Denver Web Design & Denver SEO - The Katz Web Design Blog

If you want to know more about CSS sprites and how to put them together, feast your eyes on Google’s:

You can’t get much more efficient than that…

Now Safari’s just as cool as Firefox

If you’re a web developer on the Mac, you may be sick of everyone talking about Firefox Addons that do everything but wipe your ass. True, Firefox is a great browser that is very expandable, but I love Safari, and I want to do as much web development on Safari as possible.

The feature that I missed the most in Safari was Disable Styles and Disable Javascript, both of which are super-easily done in Firefox via the Web Developer Plugin. With the advent of Safari 3, disabling CSS and Javascript is as simple as a keystroke combination of your choice! (more…)

osCommerce accessibility stinks

osCommerce default installation is a huge mess for accessibility. Every piece of code that the platform spits out has endless tables and poorly coded HTML — finding your way through the code is like trying to clear brush.

The simple solution to osCommerce accessibility is to install the Simple Template System and put together a XHTML/CSS’ed out template.  That only solves one part of the problem, however, because your wonderful template is going to be wrapping around a whole slew of undesirable code.

Over a year ago, a client of mine wanted an osCommerce website. I wanted to create a masterpiece of accessibility. I tackled osCommerce head-on and re-wrote most of the code that creates the HTML.  It was a nightmare, but I created a nearly validating eCommerce website with osCommerce.

The experience was so scarring that I haven’t yet written about it Nearly every file was affected, so upgrading it would be a nightmare, but it’s truly an effort of love.

KWD presents: a nearly validating, tableless osCommerce website

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I’ve been looking for a shopping cart like this for a long time

One of my clients is looking to move from osCommerce to a more user-friendly solution, and I really want to use a shopping cart that is XHTML and standards-compliant…Something that validates and looks pretty with stylesheets off, has a full feature set, and a great admin panel. 

I was quite pleasantly surprised when I discovered Tradingeye. They have a well-coded shopping cart solution as well as a CMS. Very, very interesting.  Looks like a pleasure to develop for; like WordPress for eCommerce. Check out their Shopping cart demo. (more…)

I normally don’t work with ASP; I use PHP for my coding. Recently, I had to create a style.css.asp file, and I needed to find how to set a far-futures header in ASP. 

Here’s what I found in 5 minutes : (more…)

Customizing under the hood

I was talking with one of my clients who is a mechanic, and he was telling me about how he used to do a lot of car customization and performance enhancing, and that he really loved it.He told me that the problem with customizing cars is that when you start tinkering around under the hood, every little change presents new problems that need fixing, and soon, the project becomes unmanageable.

I’ve done my deal of modifying code (check out this custom XHTML osCommerce installation) and let me tell you: it doesn’t pay. My clients generally don’t care about how the site is tableless, CSS/XHTML valid, et cetera. They want to know that it works properly.

WordPress is beautiful and talks sweet to me.

WordPress is my dream in that regard: it’s beautifully coded out of the box so that creating templates is a logical, simple project. They make functions such as is_page() that allow you to simply ask “Is this the page I think it is?,” then continue to make progress. WordPress is my love. I will continue to be her bedfellow codefellow.

Both my mechanic client and I agreed: customizing is great fun, and very personally rewarding in the end. However, it’s a huge pain in the ass, and the rewards rarely (if ever) equal the effort.

Here’s the problem: I want to use CSS Sprites for transparent images, and they require different matte colors.

The promise of CSS Sprites is great: you can combine many small images into one bigger image, and use CSS to reveal only the revelant parts. But what if you have a background image, and the background changes color on :hover? When trying to save the smilies, you can only choose one matte color. I need multiple matte colors!

The issue really is a pain when you have already given your object a stroke. Using the Appearance panel, we’ll make everything happy in the world again!

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