The old adage ‘you get what you pay for’ is true in most all scenarios. Web site design included.

I shake my head when I see web design (developer / programmer / et al) classifieds on craigs list offering $8.00 - $10.00/hr. Or, the individual (or start-up) that is willing to fork out a whole $200.00 for a dynamic web site.

Am I A Perfectionist?

Maybe so. Or maybe I read too many books and blogs. I don’t think I ‘know-it-all’. Far from it. But, it aches to see fellow web designers dive into a new project with ‘mocking up a killer graphic design’ as their primary goal. If you haven’t really identified the needs of your intended audience, how do you really have a clue on your layout?
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Simple Pleasures

Our garden continues to grow, and I see no end in sight to my amazement at it.

We’ve got hearty representatives of each of the different vegatables that we planted hanging on the vine.

It’s so doggone exciting!

Every evening I lead my wife out by the hand and we ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ over how well the garden is growing.

My daughter had some friends sleep over this weekend and I dragged them out to see. Even teenage girls recognize that tiny, baby peppers and tomatoes ‘are so cute.’

As I pointed out previously I prefer to start my CSS Stylesheets out with the wildcard (*) selector zeroing out the default margin and padding settings that the various browsers implement. I do this to level the playing field and assure myself that I am starting at a common ground cross-browser.

Here’s the CSS declaration I’m talking about:

* { margin: 0; padding: 0;}

Maybe this CSS declaration is taking things a little too far. Turns out that somethings…I want left alone.
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More Multi-million Dollars of Yahoo! Research for Free!

The resources being unleased by Yahoo! this year are quite impressive. I’ve just begun reading and studying their CSS Layout Library. Of interest tonight is the Fonts CSS Library.

Big Money = Big Research

I’ve got to believe with the money that Yahoo! has, it’s wise for any serious web developer to study and learn from their research.

Yahoo! has reached conclusions on font sizing through CSS styling that is right up any devotee of web standards alley.

With the goals of:

• Offering full A-grade browser support.
• Providing consistent font sizing and line-height.
• Providing appropriate cross-OS font-family degradation paths.
• Supporting user-driven font-size adjustments in the browser, including cross-browser consistency for adjusted sizes.
• Working in both “Quirks Mode” and “Standards Mode.”
• Normalizing the dimensions of an “em” unit, facilitating liquid-dimension development.

Yes. This stuff rocks!
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Understanding Complex CSS Class Selectors

Understanding how a CSS Class Selector effects an element can sometimes be tricky. Especially, when you start to deal with Child Selectors.

Reading a CSS declaration right-to-left (r-t-l) helps decipher what is happening a little better than reading left-to-right (l-t-r). You can use the same method to write what can be a sometimes tricky CSS style.

Here are some examples of what I mean. They all produce the same result, but in a different way.
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