Category Archives: Design

Transcending CSS

Working at GreatSchools we do a lot of CSS work and we have a number of CSS books on our library shelf. However, last month we picked up a copy of Transcending CSS and it’s far and away the most … Continue reading

Posted in Design, Web | 1 Comment

GreatSchools wins Webby People’s Voice Award

I’m thrilled that GreatSchools has won the Webby People’s Voice Award for best Family/Parenting site. We’ve been in the nominations before but I think continued growth and brand awareness through a largely redesigned site helped push us over the top … Continue reading

Posted in Design, Web | Comments Off on GreatSchools wins Webby People’s Voice Award

Deferring ad loading on your pages to avoid unnecessary outages

At GreatSchools we’ve had 3rd party ad server outages or slowness effectively make our site unusable as users browsers waited for certain ads to render before rendering the rest of the page. I had originally thought just specifying height and … Continue reading

Posted in CSS, Design, Javascript, Software Engineering, Web | 2 Comments

Using image tags (for style elements) in HTML is bad design

Update 4/11/06: I’ve received some criticism on this post from people who assumed I was saying you should never use image tags in HTML. My bad for the misleading title, I’ve added to the title in parens to be more … Continue reading

Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Design, Search Engine Optimization | 9 Comments

Crawler side effects of using XHTML entity references

We’re slowly moving towards making GreatSchools XHTML compliant (we have a long way to go though)! To start we’ve begun using proper XHTML entity references for URL’s with & as a separator instead of plain old & in a few … Continue reading

Posted in Design, Search Engine Optimization | Comments Off on Crawler side effects of using XHTML entity references

Enhancements to subModal

I started hacking around with subModal (modal javascript windows with background shading) this morning to add some features I liked in Lightbox Gone Wild. You can try it out and download my changes to subModal here. They are

Posted in Design, Javascript, Web | 31 Comments

Hiring a web front-end engineer and a rant

Update 3/28/06: Still looking… not for a web designer but a web front-end engineer. Jemery does a good job of describing the distrinction. No doubt about it, this is a hot skill set that is extremely hard to find! I’m … Continue reading

Posted in Design, Javascript, Web | 6 Comments