A great quote from LED Digest this morning:
for some markets SEO is irrelevant because the website is at its achievable maximum, and (perhaps more commonly) using top-class SEO on many a website is putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig, and pigs are famous for not flying.
Today I was honored (no really, I’m being serious) to be invited to join the top-notch networking group organized by my top-notch marketing consultant. I was invited to visit two years ago but was not asked at that time because my business was just getting started, but now it’s a different ballgame.
Networking has been kind of a sore spot with me – I was fortunate enough to come across one group that’s been good experience all around, but another has been hit-or-miss and I’m still on the fence about whether I’m going to remain a member. The reasons: it’s expensive if I go to each large monthly event, and the membership rarely meet any of the criteria for ‘the ideal client’ that I’ve so carefully cultivated with my business coach (or ‘business therapist’ as I like to refer to her).
I know the argument that, well, if I know 40 people that aren’t necessarily potential customers, still they know many other people that might be. I know that. But I just can’t help feeling that I’m wasting my time there. The group dynamics and demographics don’t fit my style of doing business or the kind of clients I enjoy working with. This is what I’ve observed so far.
It’s been over a year and a half and I haven’t received one lead that turned into a client – and yes I know you get out of it what you put in, but the environment, combined with the kinds of businesses that are members, is just not me. The smaller groups are much more me - I enjoy them more and get much more out of them and can contribute more as well since I feel more comfortable.
Sigh. I need to think about it a bit more, since my marketing consultant continually encourages me to get more involved, but I’m leaning away from the fence on the other side right now.
Someone sent me this link to web design client quotes yesterday. I haven’t read them all (it’s a huge page) but so far my favorite is: ‘Can you make it glossy like my brochure?’
Woot! My NZXT Apollo case just arrived (and no damage from UPS). Beautiful. The first step in replacing my Dell Dimension 2400, but for right now the immediate goal is a cooler system.
It’s standing there on the dining room table, looming rather like the monolith from 2001 if the monolith had a side window…
It’s a happy day.
I just went to look at my stats for July, and it shows that 29.7% of my visitors are using the latest version of FF. 27.1% are using IE6, and 10.8% IE7. I think this is the first time that FF has beaten out IE6 on my business site.
I’ve used various tabs from Exploding-Boy on several occasions – they’re CSS-only, they look nice and have neat compact code. Kudos to Christopher Ware for putting these together.
For my new project, however, I need the tabs to drop down from the header div. After finding only the inverted sliding doors tabs from 456 Berea Street and not much else, I decided to try working with the Exploding-Boy tabs as a base.
So here in this example you can see the original tabs at the top and my inverted ones at the bottom. The CSS for both is in the example file – the only modifications I made were:
1. Changed the border on #tabs6a (my version) to the top rather than the bottom.
2. Changed the padding on #tabs6a ul so the tabs were moved up against the border in 1, above.
3. Took the two images (the left and right sides of the tabs) and flipped them vertically.
4. Changed the background position of #tabs6a a:hover from -42px to -15px.
5. Changed the background position of #tabs6a a:hover span from -42px to -15px.
Now it looks fine in IE7, FF, and Netscape.
One problem – Opera doesn’t seem to play well with image background-position; I’m using Opera 9.1 and I didn’t find anything specifically referring to this version, but I did for 7.5 and others. In any event, the background-position was a little off for Opera, so I had to have a workaround for that…
I don’t normally use hacks in my sites, but in this case I used the media queries hack for Opera – I would appreciate a better suggestion if anyone has one!
@media all and (min-width: 0px) {
#tabs6a a:hover {
background-position: 0% -17px;
}
#tabs6a a:hover span {
background-position: 100% -17px;
}
}
I’m happy with the way this is working now and hope this is of use to others too.
