The hapless ramblings of an intoxicated web designer.

As a web designer, I’m constantly pitted against the shortcomings of Internet Explorer. This is particularly the case for me, as my speciality is CSS. Often it feels like I’m burning the midnight oil so Bill Gates can line his pockets. Today I thought I’d have a bit of fun with Firefox Adsense referrals..

downloadfirefoxfree.co.uk

Creating referral sites is becoming something of a serial addiction for me now. It’s great fun to do, and you simply can’t make a loss doing it - especially if you’ve got a reseller hosting account.

Can you make money doing these sites?

Yes, quite a bit actually - especially considering they take just a few hours to make. This sort of single page content is ideal for lazy-eyed visitors such as those from Stumbleupon, search engines, etc.

As a designer, I’ve learned never to under-estimate people’s capacity for laziness. Unless you want to spend a long time investing in a site, the best strategy you can take is one such as this.

Adsense placement

For those bookworm types amongst you, I thought I’d give just a few tips on ad placement. First thing to notice is the top horizontal link unit. This can be quite an art at times but, if you can do it, make it look like a very lazily put together menu. Most people don’t expect a site to be just a single page. You’d be surprised how many end up clicking on this, expecting it to be navigation.

Secondly, notice that I use a simple php detection script to remove the referral ads from non Internet Explorer users. Since there’s no profit in showing ads to these people I won’t subject them to it.

Finally, notice the standard banner at the very bottom. I like to think of this as the ‘what next?’ zone. Give users options here, and they’ll reward you.

Why do you do this?

Often, when I have the dreaded ‘designer’s block’, I create single page sites just like this one. I think somehow it gets my creative juices flowing again.

You might well argue that I’m polluting the web with mediocre, half assed content. I say, in return, that when a guy’s gotta go, he’s just gotta go..

Popularity: 25% [?]

I thought I would re-post this since people seem to have found it useful. IE6 is a real problem for tableless designers. Its lack of W3C compliance tends to ruin our designs and we’re left with a choice between using ugly conditional comments and hacks. In some cases a feature will be totally unsupported and a web designer is forced to scrap his design.

Dean Edwards, a programmer from London, has a solution to some of these problems. Over the years he has been working on his unfortunately named ‘IE7′ compliance javascript libraries. The libraries fix many of IE6’s compliance issues. It also supports a number of CSS2 selectors as well as PNG transparency.

Unfortunately, like all javascripts, we must take account of the fact that they my be disabled by the end user. Therefore it’s important never to create design that depends upon these libraries for basic stability. They do, however, make an excellent addition for anyone looking to show off new selectors and other features, without risk of compromising the overall design.

Popularity: 14% [?]