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.

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.

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.

So I’m back from my Christmas break, two weeks spent on a whirlwind “tour” of New Zealand catching up with family. It was a blast as always, but god damn it was cold for this time of year! I’m back in sunny Melbourne again and slowly easing back into work mode, and I’ll kick my blogging year off nice and easy with a review of Firebug which I ran out of time to finish before my holiday.

A recent article by Kevin Yank in the Sitepoint Tech Times newsletter drew my attention to TweakPNG, a handy tool that can correct the age old problem of PNG color shift in Internet Explorer.

As a web developer there comes a time when you need to consign a browser to the dustbin of history, and remove it from your testing suite. It’s a decision I find difficult to make - I am a visual designer and hate the idea that a website I built might look less than perfect for anyone at all. But to offer our audience an experience that takes advantage of the best the web has to offer, it is necessary to weigh the needs of the many against the needs of the few. In this article I will look at some best practices for dropping support for a browser, and suggest a list of browsers that make the cut (and ones that don’t).

Over the years I have had the opportunity to collaborate with a number of print designers on website designs. The way these collaborations usually work is that the print designer will mock-up initial static layouts for the website, and it will fall to me to bring their mock-up to life in either Flash or HTML. These collaborative efforts can be very rewarding, but there are a few common “gotchas” that tend to catch print designers unawares when they first try their hand at designing for the web. Most of the problems stem from design challenges that are particular to the web, and wouldn’t typically be encountered by a print designer.

Now that Internet Explorer 7 has been released, I imagine many web designers will be running it as their default installation of IE, and using standalone versions to test sites in IE 6 or older. One longstanding drawback of these standalone versions is the inability to use the AlphaImageLoader filter, which enables the display of transparency in PNG images. Thankfully there is now a simple solution at hand.

In my experience, most web design clients don’t know much about design, and even less about the web. This isn’t a fault, and it doesn’t make them a bad client. It makes them a regular web user. But sometimes the knowledge gap between a designer and their client can lead to communication problems. I have found that with a little education my clients are better equipped to understand my decision making processes, and we are able to start talking to each other, rather than past each other.