There are a variety of tools out there for you to use to browse the internet, known as web browsers. The major browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera, and each of these has a number of different versions. One of the biggest challenges we face as web designers is ensuring that a website looks right in all browsers. Often it’s not possible for a site to look exactly the same, but we try to make it as close as possible. Perhaps the biggest headache of them all is Internet Explorer 6 (and all it’s sub-versions). IE6 was first released back in 2001, which is a long time ago in internet years. Because of this, there are many modern techniques which are simply not supported by IE6, and even those that are supposed to be supported often don’t work well. Google has recently announced that it no longer supports IE6 because of security vulnerabilities. We are now following suit and no longer testing new sites in IE6 unless specifically requested to do so. This has been a tough decision to make, but will save a lot of development time. If you are still running IE6, we strongly suggest you upgrade your browser to IE8 (if you’re a big IE fan), Firefox 3.6 or Google Chrome

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Open Source software is something that you might not have heard of before. Open Source literally means that the source code is available to edit and extend. A lot of Open Source software is released under a license which means that it’s freely available to download, install and use (although there are many versions of licence – so it’s worth checking the detail).

The advantages of Open Source software are pretty obvious. The software is free – and with a little expertise you can use it straight away, and with a little more expertise you can change the way it works to suit you. Many of the Content Managed sites that we build are based on Open Source systems, which means that the client doesn’t need to spend hundreds of pounds on a commercial system, and only pays for our time to set it up, and design & build the site.

There are however some disadvantages, and how much this affects you will depend on the nature of your business, the use you have for the application, and your outlook. Open Source software tends not to have detailed documentation (although there are exceptions) so you may need to work out how to use it with some trial and error. There are usually however thriving communities on the internet who will help out newbie’s. Open Source software is generally produced by a community of developers, and becasue of this there may be quite frequent version releases. This can be positive because your application will get new features and bug fixes, but if you don’t have the expertise to do the upgrades yourself, you may need to pay someone to do it for you.

So, what can Open Source do for your business? Well, there are web applications out there that deal with a number of business problems, including Website Content Management (CMS), Customer Resource Management (CRM), Human Resource Management (HRM), Online Forums, Blogs, Project Management, Collaboration Software, Image Galleries, Document Management, and more!

So, if you fancy trying out a free alternative before investing in costly commercial software, get in touch to see what we can do.

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At WDL we’re loving Googles link rel=canonical at the moment. It’s long been a problem with Google (and any other search engine) that a single page on a website can be seen as many separate pages:

http://www.websitedesign.co.uk
http://www.websitedesign.co.uk/index.php
http://websitedesign.co.uk
http://websitedesign.co.uk/index.php

and so on will all resolve to a single page, yet Google will see each as an individual resource. This can be a problem for a number of reasons. First is that Google will make an arbirtary decision about which one of these will be the ‘main’ page for it’s index which may not agree with your choice, and second, that the power of your incoming links can be dissipated if sites linking to use use different URL’s.

Google has addressed this problem by asking webmasters to add this tag to the head section their pages:

This link tells Google that http://www.websitedesign.co.uk should be considered the ‘main’ URL for all of the URL’s that resolve to the home page of our site. Now, with the canonical link in place, all the links that point to our home page will boost the link popularity for the single URL http://www.websitedesign.co.uk.

For full information about canonical, check ou this page on Google Webmaster Help.

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If you own any domain names, then look out for this scam.
I received an email offering to buy a domain I own:

Dear Sir,
we are interested to buy your domain name TENDRING.INFO and offer 65% of the appraised market value.
As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sedo.com
pddomains.com
accuratedomains.com

If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Domain Resale

The email is a scam run by the cheapest of the three appraisal companies. Ignore it!!

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With the release of firefox 3 you be wondering wheter you can run both versions of firefox at the same time, well some people will tell you you cant but you can.

It all boils down to 2 things, the profile manager and the shortcuts.

This post assumes that you know how to use the advanced installtion of firefox and have firefox version 2 in one folder and firefox version 3 in another (in my case “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2″ and “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3″)

Start by making 2 different profiles in the profile manager, to do this make sure firefox is closed and its not running in the background.

Run the profile manager by running the following command…

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\firefox.exe” -profilemanager

Remember to change the Firefox directory to where you have installed firefox.

Within the profile manager make a new profile call it whatever you want. In my case just for ease i have called them Firefox2 and Firefox3.

Now I’m not sure if the following shortcut syntax works with Firefox3, but I add it just to keep consistency.

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\firefox.exe” -P Firefox2 -no-remote

As with before make sure you change the directory to where you installed your version, and do the same on the firefox3 shortcut but change the profile name.

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3\firefox.exe” -P Firefox3 -no-remote

And viola, you can run two versions of FireFox along with your 3rd favourite browser.

As a quick sidenote if you want both firefoxes to have the same bookmarks, history, etc… just copy the contents of the orignal default folder to the new profile you’ve made.

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

The default folder should read something like…

4scygde1.default

Just copy the contents of that folder into your new profile folder.

And yes, I run three screens simultaneously.

browsers, cheat, Design, Firefox, internet, syntax, website Hide