AbsoluteB.com

I have to admit, when I design a website, the choice of font, though absolutely crucial, is rarely a difficult one. When I design a logo or some kind of identity however, it’s a different story, but because I’m designing a potential image or vector, the decision to use a unique font isn’t as difficult, because designing a website means my choices are pretty limited because of the tiny list of standard fonts installed on a viewers computer. In any case, I personally am a bigger fan of clean and simple fonts and prefer the use of sans-serifs in my designs, though should a project call for it, serif fonts do have their moments. It’s not always a big deal though; besides the logo or the headers of a website, I don’t find using a unique font for content all that important, or even good practice. Sure there are ways around it like creating an image of the font, but the use of alt tags isn’t very SEO (though I’m told it is improving all the time by our SEO specialist at Bonobos), and since I would usually only use a unique font for headers and titles and such anyway, that would mean leaving out the H tags which is a big SEO no-no. But now I’ve come across a pretty awesome solution called Cufon (sorry that I came across like an infomercial just then). …read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve been pondering what the true value is of having a website’s code validated. I validate all of my projects and since releasing AbsoluteB, I naturally had the site’s XHTML and CSS code checked as well. Having fixed the few errors that there were, I then asked myself was Is it worth it? Was it necessary? And who cares? First of all, one thing I should point out about me is that I absolutely cannot stand showing off my site to someone, a moment when pride should flow over me as I hit the return key after typing the URL, expecting to see the design and layout I have worked on so hard, only to find that something isn’t right. Usually the person viewing my site with me doesn’t even notice, the detail is just that small because it really comes down to me being obsessively pixel perfect, but it’s there, and the fact that I know about it can eat me up inside. It is for this reason that I feel that validating code has it’s benefits. Having solid code gives that 99% chance that it will look the way you intended it on most browsers and platforms… most of the time, but these daysm that just isn’t the case. …read the rest of this entry »

As is generally the case with most web projects, announcing completion just means that you’re done with that particular phase of the project and that you can proceed on to the next; post project maintenance, bug fixing, etc. AbsoluteB was no different, though I have to say it could have been worse and I really shouldn’t even complain. The launch of AbsoluteB went really very smoothly with some minor cross browser/platform CSS issues which I partially blame on the fact that this was the very first project I completed on my just over two month old Macbook Pro. And of course I’ve done cross browser testing on past projects, but for a second I forgot about the usual suspect for compatibility issues; MS Internet Explorer (yikes). …read the rest of this entry »