PNG Images in IE6

PNG is obviously the best choice for images when designing websites. This can be argued of course, but the file size is small, and most importantly, there is true transparency available. If you ever see a cool little badge floating around on a website, chances are that it’s PNG. That said, I don’t use them.

Why? Because IE 6 does not support them. And IE 6 is still on my list of browsers I make a site look good for. I’ll probably have to debug in IE 6 for atleast another year while people migrate over to IE 7, then IE 8. So, I guess I can’t use PNG’s – unless I found a super smart work around – which I did! Check out this guys PNG fix for IE 5.5 (which is dead to me) and IE 6:

IE PNG Fix

I haven’t implemented it yet, but will in the very next site that I build. The solution is clean and non intrusive – please let me know if you have used this and what you think in the comments below.

The Site Smiths has just completed an incredible Alabama Attorney Directory for Local-Attorney.com. If you are in need of finding an attorney in Alabama, then check out this wonderful resource! Even better, if you have experience with any of the attorneys in the directory, you can write a review!

When designing a website, it is necessary to fill your pages with content to see what the overall page will look like once it is finished. To that end, web designers including The Site Smiths have long been borrowing from the graphic design profession and specifically their use of dummy text for graphic designs. All of the Latin you see in a pre-launch website is simply there to show what text will look like on the page. All of the text will be replaced by the correct and relevant content prior to launch.

You can read more about the use of Latin text and even generate random paragraphs for your own use with this very helpful site, Lorem.com

Sometimes my clients need an easy way to modify the size of their digital photos in order to use our Content Management System, Wordpress. The easiest way to do this is to use the website Resizr.

Once at the website, click “browse” and choose an image from your computer just like when we were adding one to your website. The next box is for width. About 700px would be good for a large picture, 350px for a medium and 150px for a small picture . Click “Resizr” and wait about 10 seconds. A page will come up with your picture on it. You need to save this picture.

You can save any picture from anywhere on the web by simply right clicking on the image, and then choosing “save picture as”, and then choosing the where to place it on your computer. This is the same way you will grab the newly resized picture.
To use this image in your website, continue with these directions -

Once you have saved the new picture somewhere on your computer, just go into Wordpress, and into the page you want to add the picture to, browse down to the upload box, choose “browse” and fill in the description and title, then click upload, and then make sure the radio button “thumbnail” is selected. Click upload to browser and there you are.

A Favicon is that pretty little graphic in the address bar of your browser that shows up for some sites. For example, head on over to my client’s site Cochrane Insurance.com to see it in action. It’s pretty easy to complete this task on the Mac. First, head over to Steve Cooley’s instructional page. Download the software, and then follow Steve’s instructions. However, make sure to use the code below instead of Steve’s, as his includes characters that will throw it all off.

Hope this helps anyone looking to create a Favicon!

This page is under construction! Hold on to your hats - this new site is still in development, and was just launched Friday, April 9th @ 9:50pm... so when Monday rolls around, we'll get our content loaded up! Thank you!