Mar
3

Two Tips - CSS in Email Newsletters

By Marge R

Anyone who has tried to create an email newsletter using cascading style sheets already knows that there are issues with certain email clients. So let’s talk about which clients have problems, what causes some of the problems and a couple of suggestions on how you create an email newsletter that will look ok in all clients?

Let’s start by looking at the cause. Gmail is one of the worst. In fact, a good rule of thumb has always been that if you can get your email newsletter to look ok in Gmail, then it is a pretty safe bet that it will look ok everywhere else.

Gmail is a browser-based email client, which means that it is already an HTML page. So if your newsletter contains the standard HTML page tags (ie. <head>, <body>), Gmail strips them out, because they are basically redundant with those same tags that already exist within the Gmail web page. And if you think about it, that automatically impacts any external or page embedded CSS that you may have used.

Read more

Filed Under CSS, Dreamweaver, Expressions Web, FrontPage, Outlook, Web Technologies |

Feb
16

SERPs - Taking Control

By Marge R

Ok, I promised you  some specific HTML tags for controlling your web page’s description in the search engine results pages. If you remember, the different search engines display different things … your meta description tag, the description from the Open Directory Project, or the Yahoo Directory description.

Under all circumstances, you want to add a meta description tag to your web pages, since this is the most utilized. This should be positioned in the HTML <head> section:

<meta name = “description” content = “Your page description here.” />

If you don’t want the search engines to grab the description from the Open Directory Project, use a robots tag to tell them to ignore that description:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

To tell Yahoo to ignore their directory description:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir” />

The other piece of information that the search engines like to use is a text snippet from the page content that matches the keyword searched. There is nothing you can do to control this. But really … as searchers, many of us like to see that there is content that matches our search on the web page before we follow the link to the page. So the text snippets are probably not a bad thing.

Filed Under Dreamweaver, Expressions Web, FrontPage, General, SEO, Web Technologies, search |

Feb
10

Search Engine Results Lists

By Marge R

It’s me again, with more information about search engines and how they work. This time I’m looking at the search engine results pages (SERPs) … and how they come up with the descriptions that they use for your web pages.

Have you ever wondered how the search engines determine what to display on their results list pages describing your site? Sometimes it is an excerpt from your page content, although not always the same excerpt. Other times they grab the description meta tag information. And other times it seems to come out of nowhere.

So here is how it is done:

Google uses the description from the meta tag, if there is one. If the description meta tag is missing, they will use a sentence from the page that contains the searched keyword. And if the web page is listed in the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), Google sometimes uses the description in the DMOZ directory.

Yahoo uses a combination of the first part of the meta description tag’s content, along with a text snippet from the page containing the searched keyword. If there is no meta description tag, Yahoo will use the description from Yahoo’s directory. If there is no description in the directory either, Yahoo will just display relevant text snippets from the page.

MSN/Live uses the first sentence on the page that contains the searched keyword. If the searched keyword doesn’t appear on the page, they use the first sentence on the page. If a description exists in the DMOZ directory, MSN/Live will use that description.

So how do you take control of your description in the results list? Check back here for specific HTML tags for controlling your page’s results list description …

Filed Under Dreamweaver, Expressions Web, FrontPage, General, SEO, Web Technologies, search |

Jan
18

Web Accessibility Lawsuit Proceeds

By Marge R

On January 2, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied Target Corporation’s petition to appeal a class action suit filed against the retailer by the National Federation of the Blind. The suit was based on Target’s failure and refusal to make its web site fully accessible to blind shoppers. 

As a result, the suit will proceed against Target on behalf of all blind Americans, as well as for a subclass of all blind Californians. 

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “We are pleased that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has allowed our lawsuit against Target to move forward on its merits.  Target can no longer delay being held accountable to the blind of the nation for denying us access to its Web site.” 

On a related note, the National Federation of the Blind and Amazon.com announced that Amazon.com will be accessible to blind users by the end of June 2008.

Filed Under Dreamweaver, Expressions Web, FrontPage, General, Usability, Web Accessibility, Web Technologies |

Nov
21

A Clean Paste from Word

By Marge R

Pasting content from Word directly into your web page editor (FrontPage, Expression Web, Dreamweaver) will insert bloated code. This will not only make your pages larger in file size than they need to be, but will also cause your page to fail validation compliance tests.

One solution is to copy the text from Word to Notepad, and then again from Notepad to your web page editor. Notepad strips the formatting out of the text, allowing you to paste it as plain text.

Expression Web introduces another option which is conveniently attached to the right mouse clicks that FrontPage users have become so dependent on.

First make sure the Show Paste Options button is selected (Tools > Page Editor Options > General Tab > Cut and Paste Options)

Now when you right click and choose ‘Paste’, the pasted content will appear, along with a paste icon.

Mouse over that icon and an arrow will appear. When you mouse over that, a menu will display allowing you to choose different types of paste options for the already pasted text.

As you select from the menu, the pasted text will change formatting as follows:

Keep Source Formatting: Preserve the style formatting of the source document, regardless of the styles in the current Expression Web document. For example, if you copy Heading 2 text from a Microsoft Word document and paste it into a page in Expression Web, selecting Keep Source Formatting ensures that the Word Heading 2 style is applied. This is useful if Heading 2 is formatted differently in the two programs and you want to keep the Word formatting.

Remove Formatting: Use this option to remove all formatting, and paste the selection as plain text.

Keep HTML Only: Use this option when you want Expression Web to render rather than display HTML tags. For example, if you copy an example of HTML code from a web browser (for example, <i>italic text</i>) to a page in Expression Web, selecting Keep HTML Only ensures that the example code is rendered as italic text.

Keep Text Only: Use this option to remove all formatting, and paste the selection as plain text. The difference between this and the Remove Formatting option is that this one also prompts you to set options in the Paste Text dialog to control line breaking and white space. (The Paste Text dialog box options will be a future blog topic.)

Filed Under Expressions Web, Microsoft, Web Technologies |

Oct
28

FrontPage vs. Expression Web

By Marge R

Although FrontPage has been one of the most popular, and easiest to use web site development tools since it hit the market back in the 1990’s … it has not been one to keep up with and comply with the latest W3C specifications.

Microsoft’s new web building tool, Expression Web, builds on the FrontPage 2003 technologies. But because Microsoft’s goal with Expression Web was to support the current web standards, some of the features that were not standards-compliant have been eliminated. A quick look at some of the missing features:

1. Web Components: features such as the photo gallery and hit counters made easy … while at the same time generating very heavy, proprietary code that was not standards-compliant

2. FrontPage Server Extensions: proprietary scripts that handled the FrontPage Web Components and server side scripting such as form processing … made life easy for the non-technical web designer

3. Themes and Shared Borders: offered quick ways to style pages for that consistent look and feel … while creating more proprietary code that was, you guessed it, not standards compliant

4. Database Interface Wizard: allowed the webmaster to easily set up and use database connections … required FrontPage Server Extensions

Although these features have been eliminated in the new product, the functionality is still there, via more standards-compliant methods. We’ll take a look at these and other aspects of the new Expression products in upcoming posts.

Filed Under Expressions Web, FrontPage |