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Blogs ยป Archive for October 13th, 2005
Reinvent yourself
I once got some great advice about dating: “Want to date a ‘10′? Then be a ‘10′.”
The same is true in business. If you want ‘10′ clients — well-known, high-paying, exciting assignments — then you have to be a ‘10′ developer/designer.
Sometimes that means reinventing yourself. Fortunately, that’s not terribly hard to do in business. In fact, I’m doing some reinvention of my own right now. I’ve grown a bit weary of certain types of clients that call from time to time (boring, me-too companies), and want to work exclusively with dynamic companies with unique business propositions.
So:
- I’ve gotten testimonials/endorsements from investment bankers and others who work with these sorts of companies.
- I’ve built up referral releationships with the same folks (and continue to do so).
- Coming soon is a new website with a value proposition/marketing message that speaks more powerfully to my target audience.
- I’ve adjusted my solution set to meet the needs of this group.
- I’ll be writing and speaking to this group shortly, in order to get visible.
We create perceptions of ourselves through our language and through our appearance (both in marketing materials and in how we carry ourselves).
In a snap, we can determine to be something different …
Web 2.0 is about…
This is a reprint from the Tech Times #124, for those who don’t follow that publication.
Web 2.0 is about what the development community considers new and good ideas and trends in Web development today. Though the specific technologies, companies, and applications that symbolize Web 2.0 change daily, there are some core themes that they all share. It is these themes that, in my mind, define Web 2.0.
I should point out that I haven’t devised this list on my own. A lot of bright minds have tackled this question before me, and this is only my take on the answer. Other authorities you might like to consult are Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0 and Jeff Veen’s Designing for Web 2.0.
Sites as applications
When people first hear about Web 2.0, this is usually the angle they come at it from: Websites with rich user interfaces that behave more like desktop applications than a collection of interlinked pages to be read.
The first widely-used examples have come from Google: Gmail and Google Maps. If you haven’t tried them yet, you really should.
Macromedia actually began pushing this approach to Web design several years ago, under the banner of Rich Internet …
Microsoft says: de-hack your CSS
The IEBlog has appealed to Web designers to ask them to do away with a number of hacks that are commonly used to apply CSS formatting in Internet Explorer only. These are the most common hacks in question:
- html > body details
- * html details
- head:first-child + body details
- head + body details
- body > element details
Many of the CSS parsing quirks that these hacks are based on have been fixed in IE7, meaning that the IE-specific formatting they apply will not be applied in IE7.
Now, if the IE rendering quirk your hack was designed to work around has been fixed in IE7 too, that’s just fine. But if if hasn’t, then your site’s design will break in the new browser.
Microsoft is hoping developers will instead use the more predictable conditional comments feature of Internet Explorer 5 or later to put IE-only CSS in a separate style sheet, which will only be used by that browser:
<!–[if IE]><link rel=”stylesheet” href=”ieonly.css” type=”text/css” /><![endif]–>
But as I said, due to the many rendering fixes forthcoming in IE7, you’ll only want some of your IE-specific CSS to apply in IE7. You’ll therefore need to divide up your IE-specific styles even further. …
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