One of my clients is currently optimizing their website for search engines. As part of the process I met with a rep from an SEO firm, who suggested ways the website design could be tweaked to be as friendly as possible to search engines. Most of the ground he covered was not new to me, but one tip was an eye opener: he advised me to entirely remove the meta keywords tags from the website.

Everyone loves a good black and white photograph, they have an immediacy and elegance that’s hard to resist. But converting a color photograph to grayscale in Photoshop will often produce a lackluster result. Here’s a tip for creating black and white images that really come to life.

You’re probably already familiar with sIFR, a technique that replaces boring HTML text with spiffy Flash text, without messing up your HTML markup. In the same vein comes swfIR, which uses Flash to perform a host of desirable modifications to images: borders, rounded corners, rotation and drop shadows.

yourminis is Goowy’s foray into the ‘customizable homepage’ space, a veritable smoragasbord of RSS feeds and widgets. The service is very similar to Netvibes, but with one big difference - yourminis is a Flash application.

An article on the importance of making hyperlinks stand out might seem like an exercise in stating the obvious. I would have thought so too, until I came across the portfolio site of a reputable web design firm last week and found myself playing a game of link hide-and-seek.

Back in 2003 Mark Angeletti wrote an article for Sitepoint titled Flash Vs. CSS/HTML: Which Will You Choose?, in which he examined the strengths and weaknesses of Flash. Mark closed his article by suggesting that in the future Macromedia had the opportunity to fix Flash’s weaknesses, and would likely do so. I thought it would be interesting to look at how much progress has been made in the past four years, and see if those weaknesses have indeed been addressed, or if there is still work to be done.

Recently I designed a site that had two navigation menus: a global navigation bar and a breadcrumb trail. It was the first time I had ever used breadcrumbs as the only form of secondary navigation, and it got me thinking about this humble form of website navigation.

It’s a while since I gave any thought to spacer gifs, but I was looking at the Exxon website tonight (as you do on a Tuesday evening) and saw something that made me chuckle. I was viewing the site in Firefox (of course), and noticed that on many pages the text “spacer.gif” appeared prominently within the layout.

CSS Advisor is a newish community website from Adobe. On CSS Advisor users can post their own CSS tips, or pose questions which other community members can attempt to answer. This question/solution format promises that CSS Advisor will remain more focused than the average forum, and provide a practical resource to call upon when faced with a sticky CSS issue. Within a few minutes on the site I discovered a potential solution to a long time CSS bugbear of mine - Safari’s ‘Wmode flicker’ when DHTML dropdown menus are displayed over a Flash movie.

Well it looks as if Microsoft has screwed up royally with Outlook 2007, at least insofar as the way HTML emails are rendered. Instead of using the not-too-shabby Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine to display HTML emails, Microsoft opted to use a customized version of the Word 2007 rendering engine. That’s right, from now on your beautifully constructed HTML newsletters are going to be rendered by the crime against layout known as Microsoft Word. That fact alone was enough to send shivers down my spine, but when I dug a little deeper I discovered just how dire the situation really is.