| LED Digest 2476: Designing with CSS |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.GetWebContent.com/LED : the LED's Key Sponsor The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. www.SEOToolSet.com/training/ : the LED's Premier Sponsor Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training & Certification ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. August 22, 2007 Issue no. 2476 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= <Moderator Comment> ~ Google Framing --== Competitors Bidding on a URL ==-- ~ Ronni Rhodes "Just yesterday, American Airlines sued Google over this..." ~ Maty Matyszak "...trademark and URL are different things." --== The Art of Pricing [was: Urgency Marketing] ==-- ~ John Audette "Never sell on price alone." --== The Hell of CSS ==-- ~ Alicia Lane "A good designer...will set up well-organized styles..." ~ Stephen Mareches "...start out with small things like using CSS to define your font size, font family and color." ~ Mark Bishop "...I actually learn best by looking by at other people's CSS." ======== CONTINUING =============================== <Moderator Comment> I've been playing around with Danny Sullivan's new social site, Sphinn.com, and it's pretty cool. By and large there's quality content, considerate commenting, and a general good vibe. I wanted to run a little experiment there and try posting in blog style. On Sphinn you have the option of linking out to another site or just commenting, and they're voted on and featured in the same way. Anyway, here's the post http://sphinn.com/story/3442 and here's the gist of it. It's about using Google's intelligence and research to steal landing page ideas, but the real message is how Google actively seeks involvement in the SEO/M industry. It's called "framing the conversation," and they do it beautifully. Google is not evil or vindictive, they're just a business. They're very smart. Not only are they organizing the world's information, they're making publishers dependent on them for guidance on how to market, optimize, structure, and monetize their websites. The more people using their free tools, the more data they have about websites and the more cards they hold to leverage it. In many ways, Google now defines the commercial Internet. Anyway, here's the post. Go check it out and vote! "Witness Landing Page Perfection by Google" http://sphinn.com/story/3442 Looking forward to your comments... Adam ------------------------ From: Ronni Rhodes Subject: URL bidding > Why would Google allow another company > to use our URL as a keyword in their sponsored > links and AdWords listing, and what can we > do about it? - Ralph Hudson, LED Digest 2473 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1884/190/ There has been a lot of controversy on this issue. And more than one lawsuit. Just yesterday, American Airlines sued Google over this: http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=11000A3XTFVY Obviously, this question is far from settled. Kind regards, Ronni Rhodes Ignite Your Site with Sound and Motion! Make Your Marketing Memorable with Rich Media http://www.wbcimaging.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Maty Matyszak Subject: URL bidding >Just raise this with google (or any other search engine). > If you have a trademark, you can raise this and they will > delete. Nobody will be allowed to use your url in their ads. - Hein van der Honing, LED Digest 2475 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1886/190/ Not saying you are wrong here, but trademark and url are different things. Certainly URLs are unique, and they may contain trademarked terms, but they themselves are not trademarks. As to what trademarks can be used in Ads, there is an interesting lawsuit going down. American Airlines are suing Google for trademark infringement for allowing others to use American Airlines in their ads. The issue comes because someone looking for American Airlines / Builders might be looking for a generic builder / airline from America, which makes the search term arguably legitimate. This issue seems set to run for a while Maty Matyszak ============ Sponsor Message =========== Ever wonder why Presidents and board chairmen hire professional writers to craft their speeches? Because they're usually trying to sell something, be it a new federal program or a lame excuse for a lousy fourth quarter. You're in sales, too. Online sales. Your site needs words that sell, power words. http://GetWebContent.com/LED words. ============ Sponsor Message =========== -------- new post - new topic -------- From: John Audette Subject: Pricing [was: Urgency marketing] Greetings to the List.... Ah, pricing. Pricing is one of those things that is a science if you have enough empirical data -- and an art if you don't. It was always one of the most challenging aspects of building MMG in the old days. At that time there wasn't much precedent for the pricing of Internet marketing, so we pretty much had to make it up as we went along. There were two rules about pricing that were taught to me years ago by folks who were a whole lot smarter than me that I have tried to follow: (1) Set pricing at a level that creates a win-win for all involved. (2) Never sell on price alone. Number 1 is pretty obvious in most things, but especially in marketing. If your marketing budget didn't create a positive return on investment for your business, why would you spend the money? Marketing is not an expense for a business -- it's an investment. And when a business finds a marketing technique that delivers a positive ROI they will be eager to deploy as much money as they can using that technique, at least until it starts to diminish in effectiveness. As for number 2, you don't ever buy a market with discounted prices -- you just rent it as long as they're discounted. The way to build a business is by delivering solid and measurable value, not by selling yourself cheap. Kinda connected to #1, I guess. Regards, John Audette Senior Advisor AudetteMedia - Unified Internet Marketing -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Alicia Lane Subject: CSS Hell > is it sometimes hard to understand someone > else's CSS procedures? - Shaun Johnston, LED Digest 2475 It certainly can be. In reference to your earlier metaphor of learning someone else's CSS being like learning a new design program: I find that trying to grok someone else's CSS styles is no more difficult than trying to understand how a previous designer set up QuarkXpress or InDesign styles. Or, God forbid, coming to the sad realization that they've used no styles at all in a very long document and having to painstakingly comb the entire document to reapply all local formatting as global styles. I have years of experience in both print and web design so I've suffered through both scenarios. A good designer, print or web, will set up well-organized styles that are logical and easy to quickly modify down the road. I have my doubts that any WYSIWYG application will be ever able to automate this level of organization, as evidenced by the horribly disorganized documents I still come across in the more mature print design field. There is just no replacement for designer competence. In the meantime, if you aren't already, I encourage you to make liberal use of the "Inspect" command in Firefox's Firebug add-on, as well as the "Display Id & Class Details" command in the Web Developer add-on. Regards, Alicia Lane -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Stephen Mareches Subject: CSS Hell Shaun, The first big site I had to do some reworking on came to me with its CSS intact. I was still using HTML to define things like font family and size and I would try to do something and the CSS would override it. It was frustrating! In part it was because the author named classes with names that didn't make any sense, like .abovm or other meaningless things. The solution here was to create a page on the site that I called styles.htm, then on that page I set up tables, paragraphs, hyperlinks and so on, then added the link to the style sheet in the head and in the page itself added the class information such as "class="abovm" for all the classes so there was an example of each of the elements in the style sheet on the page. Now I had a page I could look at and see what the heck all the different classes would do. In the end this was my first overall tutorial in CSS, and I had an example of well defined CSS that I could use as a reference in my work. Later, I built another site for the same client, a rather involved database-driven site that created mini web sites for member users. When it was all done I showed it to the client. "I don't like the color". O boy, what fun. Three days later I had edited all 100 plus pages with the new color she wanted. That never happened again. From that time on I built with style sheets and when a client didn't like something, often during a phone interview, I could say "Just a minute", edit the line in the style sheet that governed the element we wanted to change, then upload the style sheet via FTP to the site. "OK, click Refresh / Reload on your browser" "Wow. That's exactly what I want. Talk about real-time editing!" I will admit though I don't go for pure CSS pages and do use tables for layout because browsers are still not ready for pure CSS and I'm not about to tell a client "well, just download the latest version of FireFox and it will look OK". With CSS you really do move to a different level of design, plus your work becomes more consistant. Often when working on a large site I would find myself altering what I had started out with for colors and fonts, which tends to detract from the overall effect of the site. Plus you can do some really cool thiings like make hyperlinks change color when the user hovers her mouse over them. It's understandable to be resistant to change. And the older we get, the more we become resistant. But in the end, that's what keeps us young, learning fresh things and keeping the curiosity we had as children to see the beauty in things we did not know about. Learning is painful, no matter how bright we may be. The trick is to start out with small things like using CSS to define your font size, font family and color. Then progress to using CSS to add effects to your hyperlinks. W3Schools.com has some great tutorials for CSS, plus a cool online editor where you can try out the CSS as you are reading about it. Once you get CSS to start working you'll have fun and feel pretty good about yourself. Stephen Mareches Web Consultant Sophia Solutions www.sophiasolutions.net -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mark Bishop Subject: CSS Hell You know, I actually learn best by looking by at other people's CSS style sheets. I open people websites and tweak them to eventually use them myself. A great tool is the Firefox Extension "Web Developer Toolbar". https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60 This toolbar allows you to, among other things, view a sites css files and edit them live to set out settings on the fly. It also helps you visualize where divs and other container tags are. It really helps. I'm not claiming to be a css guru. I just am slogging through it to learn a bit more every day. It's a pretty powerful and useful tool. Mark Bishop http://www.workforcelanguageservices.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by: GetWebContent.com The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. 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