While there may be some reputable SEO companies out there who offer a good service at a fair price, in my opinion, most of them are nothing more than a way for you to waste money. You would be amazed at the number of SEO companies still using outdated tactics without anyone exposing that they are doing nothing effective to improve rankings. (more…)
Full screen view: If you are surfing on small monitor and want to use full screen to view websites, simply press the F11 key and your browser will remove all toolbars and address bar. The result — a full screen to view the website! To switch to normal mode, press F11 again.
View desktop: To make all open windows transparent so you can view the gadgets an icons on your desktop, press [Windows] + [Spacebar] (more…)
American Aiport Car Service knew a thing or two about providing excellent, comfortable and safe travel service to and from the Detroit Metro Airport. After all, they had been in the airport sedan business in southeast Michigan for over eight years. But they also knew their website at the time was dated, lacking in information, and didn’t reflect the quality of their company or their service.
Their main desire was for a professional look with clear navigation that provided a easy way for their clients and customers to login, check for quotes, or make a reservation. But most importantly — it had to reflect the pride they have in America and the name of their company. (more…)
So what do you do when you want to find something on a website 
but there is no search box? Or if there is one, it’s almost impossible to find? All you need to know is one simple trick. Simply append the URL of the website with this string: ?s=keyword
For example to search this site for all pages that reference the term “webgoddess” you would type in the URL area at the top of the page: wunderwebs.com/?s=webgoddess
Try it and see what you get for a result 😉
For multiple word queries just add the + sign. For example if you wanted to search this site for pages that contain the word “webgoddess” and “spam” you would type this into the URL area:
wunderwebs.com/?s=webgoddess+spam
See, easy peasy!
When a developer creates a website for a client it needs to be compatible (look and work the same) in all popular browsers. For most every browser, this really isn’t that difficult a task. They all play rather well together. All, but Internet Explorer (IE). IE has been so bad at staying up to par on web standards, we have to hack and tweak the website code to make it compatible with IE and still appear the same in Chrome and Firefox. As a website developer, I can tell you that IE has been nothing short of a nightmare. It has an awful reputation and it’s well deserved.
Here’s what usually happens — you spend days/weeks/months designing a website. You test it out in Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and even Opera. It looks awesome! It performs flawlessly. Everything is where it should be, and it all comes together in a seamless delight. Then comes the moment of truth — you must open it up to test it in IE. More often than not, in IE the page looks like somebody put it into a blender, hit the mix button and forgot the lid. So now you have to spend double the amount of time trying to fix it to look tolerable in IE, meanwhile begging your client to please try a different browser. Of course, you could design for IE first, but then it would horrific in all the other browsers, so there really is no winning scenario here.
Websites all follow certain standards, currently HTML 4 is the one mostly used (HTML 5 is coming on strong). JavaScript and CSS are other standards. Most website browsers such as Chrome and Firefox strive to follow these standards as much as possible. This ensures that a website will look exactly the same no matter what browser you use. But in the case of IE, Microsoft doesn’t follow the those standards. And because of that, it forces developers to create specifically supported IE versions of each website page.
The only reason most people use IE is because Microsoft has made IE the default web browser for Windows and the average customer starts using it blindly. Often times, they simply are unaware that there are much better browsers available. Even when a developer or a web savvy person suggests a better browser to IE users, many IE users don’t really understand the benefit of changing even though all browsers are free to download and use. However, once a person has even limited experience with a better browser, they usually switch never to return to the land of IE. Why? Because no one wants to browse through the internet slower, or see web pages with missing links. And I haven’t even mentioned the security vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer. That’s a whole blog post in itself.
To be fair, IE 9 is the current version and I’ve been told it supposed to be faster and safer than the previous versions, and Microsoft is already hyping up the next version — IE 10. All that is fine and dandy, but from my stats tracker, I can see that the vast majority of visitors to my sites are still using IE6 and 7. In fact, no one visiting this WunderWebs site is using IE9. Not a one. So that means I am still forced to design for the old versions until rendering standards of IE and other browsers finally converge. And since IE6 has been out for over 10 years now, this convergence might not happen for another 10 years time when all IE users everyone will at least be upgraded to IE9.
*sigh*
