Some nerdy stuff ...

As part of my business (one of them ;o) ) I am setting up and maintain websites. I think a basic website is easy to set up and doesn't require anything special. But for business purpose I think that is not enough. If you want to talk to customers through the website and persuade them that your products and service is all what they need and want right now ... you need a pretty good website and the right content.

However, I did some work with CSS (cascading style sheets) yesterday and also discovered some fancy Firefox plugins.

1. The idea was to have a fancy background image. The issue is of course all the different kind of browsers and screen sizes. It is ok for the image to get stretched and shrinked to the screen. And as always Google is your best friend. Drupal is already full of containers but I needed another one, just straight after the body tag in the html file. But just before I put in the img tag with the background image and a class defined in the css file.

The body was refined in the css file as followed:

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
overflow: hidden;

The img tag class has the following styles:

width: 100%;
height: 100%;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
z-index: 5000;

And the addition div I have added just after the body tag is styled this way:

z-index: 6000;
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
overflow: auto;

2. YSlow is a fancy tool from the Yahoo developer guys for developer guys. It is a Firefox add-on and easy to get up and running. It gives you good tips why a website can be soo slow. But I have no idea if that is actually SEO friendly.

3. I am using Firebug already for a little why. Awesome how you can play with the html and css code and you see the changes straight.

4. Too lazy to google? Get CodeBurner and you have html and css references straight available.

5. And finally, some of my mates will be happy to hear that I finally made it to install NetBeans. I hope it is a useful tool. We had already a pretty good start this morning. It did some nice formatting of a crapy html code ;o)