Outward Focus Design

As a web designer who works most often with local businesses, I’m often asked how to increase visitors to a website, and how to get better rankings in Google. The answer I give usually falls on deaf ears: there is no magic bullet for getting high rankings on search engines, or increasing readership to a blog.

Why does Firefox suddenly make major version numbers out of trivial updates?

I’m working on my very first mobile specific design implementation (I know, I’m only like two years behind the times!). The project has a mobile specific version (ie. it uses a whole different site for the mobile version). This site is an e-commerce site using CommerceV3 cart software, and it is challenging to look through [...]

My current project, which is a Facebook Connect website using the asynchronous version of the JavaScript SDK, suddenly developed problems with Facebook Login and Logout. The fb:login buttons stopped working; in Firebug, I received the following note in my console: FB.login() called before calling FB.init() I had a listener attached to my logout button, which [...]

I’m using the awesome Typekit service to embed fonts in my projects these days. I just encountered an error in one of my projects while viewing the site in Internet Explorer (no surprise there!). After having used the service successfully for months, including on IE, I suddenly started getting the following error when viewing my [...]

When developing a website, we will be updating a CSS stylesheet very frequently. However, due to caching by the browser, the newest styles are not always loaded. How can you force the browser to read the latest version of the stylesheet? There are a number of suggestions I’ve read. Rename the stylesheet every time you [...]

Stumbled upon this blog post today while looking for help debugging an IE8 flaw. I was using jQuery .wrap() to dynamically add an anchor tag to an image, and it worked in all browsers but IE8 (of course!). While this might not be the only reason it doesn’t work, the solution presented on the page [...]

In some ways, email marketing is thought of as old school, what with the ease and low cost of communicating with clients and potential clients through Facebook and the other social media channels. Email is different than social media, though, in many positive ways. When someone gives you their email address, it’s a measure of [...]

Parent pages and descendant pages in Wordpress, and different ways to use conditional logic to differentiate them for your needs.

Have you ever had a customer mention that your website doesn’t look right to them, but when you look it’s fine? Or been searching the web on a friend’s computer, looked at your website, and it doesn’t look right there? Chances are your web designer did not thoroughly test the website in all browsers before [...]