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Use Dreamweaver CS3 templates to save time

May 1, 2008

Hi,

When I was working on the redesign of the killersites.com, I found (as a starting point) that the templates that ship with Dreamweaver CS3 useful.

Dreamweaver CS3 starter templates

Dreamweaver has a nice collection of bare-bones web templates. One thing I found cool about these templates, is that they contain a lot of notes that describe why they (the web-nerds at Adobe) have certain things in place – like the specific code they used to deal with a given CSS layout issue.

… This is another good way to learn more about CSS.

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How to organize your css code: the ‘killer’ css structure

April 29, 2008

I can’t stand articles that make you read two pages before getting to the point. With that in mind, let’s look at how I think css code should be organized.

php-video-tutorial

In a nutshell: css code should be divided up into at least 4 separate pages:

  1. page-structure.css
  2. text-styles.css
  3. misc.css
  4. ie-styles.css

How about we call this the ‘killer’ css structure.

🙂

Before I go into the details of what each css file contains (if it’s not already obvious), I want to quickly cover WHY you might want to use this basic css structure for all your websites.

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Killersites.com get a facelift.

April 28, 2008

Hi,

I’ve been a busy little bee lately.

This past week, I finally got around to re-skinning killersites.com. Yes, after about 5 years of using the same basic layout, I finally decided that an update was needed.

I think when someone said:

“… killersites.com kinda looks … 2000 ish.”

… I was pushed over the edge and began the design work. You can see the new layout on the home page now:

www.killersites.com

Later on, I will be rolling this out throughout the rest of the web site and on other sites as well:

– killerphp.com
– how-to-build-websites.com

etc …

To build this new look, I spent about 50 hrs and about 15 public revisions. As I went along, I released early drafts of the new look for people to comment on in the forums. You can read the thread and see the progress of the redesign here:

killersites redesign discussion

Now that I’ve got this in place, I can go back to creating new videos.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

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Are newsletters still an effective way to keep in touch with your audience?

April 14, 2008

I’ve been running the killersites.com newsletter (among a few others) for several years now. Though I’ve found it to effective, with regards to keeping in touch with people, it is clearly not what it used to be.

Stupid Spammers

podcast icon

Yea, the porn and pill spammers have really done a lot of harm to newsletters. These days, if you send out a newsletter, you will have to deal with a few things that just get in the way:

1. Email filters – gone wild.
2. Angry (crazy) recipients.

These days, email filters are really fined tuned to catch just about any type of spam. Unfortunately, they tend to trash real email from time to time. So when writing my newsletter, I have to be careful to avoid certain keywords that might get my newsletter blocked.

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The 3 Master Principles of Web Design

February 27, 2008

php-video-tutorial

Floating around the universe, are certain universal principles that transcend disciplines. I would like to explore a few of them here, and talk about how they can be applied to web design.

The Three Master Principles

#1 Simplicity

This is such an important principle, that it can easily be made into the top three web design principles, just as location is to real estate:

– location
– location
– location

… we could say the same thing about simplicity in web design:

– simplicity
– simplicity
– simplicity

The important thing to take to heart, is that your web sites should be designed to be as simple as possible. You want to keep it simple for two main reasons:

  1. To make it easy for you to update.
  2. To make it easy for visitors to navigate the web site.

The simplicity principle applies to design, structure and the code.

What do I mean by ‘structure’ of the web site?

I am simply referring to the URL structure. So we are talking about directory structures, page names etc. I’ve detailed this in my article on intelligent paths in websites.

I think the other two (design and code) are self evident.

… Now let’s look at principle number two:

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Intelligent Paths Make Websites Friendlier.

February 22, 2008

ie7 screen shot

Killersites.com is an old site, nearly 12 years old now!

Over that time (as we added more articles and tutorials), our directory structures and file naming styles changed as conventions changed. So now I have a huge mess to clean up.

… There is a lot of information buried in killersites.com that people just don’t find.

🙁

Fortunately, over the last 12-13 years of building websites and web applications, I’ve been able to figure out the best way to organize a website:

In this article, I discuss how to create an easier to maintain, more user friendly website by way of using intelligent paths.

–

So what are ‘intelligent paths’?

I’m talking about URL structures of course! So that means a few things:

  1. Building a SENSIBLE website directory structure.
  2. Using meaningful words in page names and directories.
  3. Using lower case text for page and directory names.
  4. Using dashes between words in both page and directory names.

… Let’s go over the details.

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