Don’t you just hate Mondays - this has got to be the worst of the year!!

24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December we publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer.

Previous years have seen first class tutorials and tips from some of the top minds in web development today including Paul Boag, Cameron Moll, Veerle Pieters and Jonathan Snook

It really is beginning to feel like Christmas!

This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it’d be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites’ interaction with both users and search engines.

Its pretty basic in fact but is a very good primer for people who are trying to understand the concept for the first time. Here’s a direct link to the Google SEO Guide.

222 days since I last posted. Some could accuse me of being slack or distracted and it could be a combination of the two. The truth is that, thankfully I have been very busy and I have learnt a lot since I launched this site originally nearly 3 years ago.

When I went live with the first version of the site, it was the first time I had implemented a Wordpress driven site and I was naive with the way I planned it all out. With a lack of understanding regarding the architecture of web design and Wordpress I installed a ‘blog’ in a sub folder called news. So while updating blog or news posts was done through the dashboard of Wordpress making any changes to the site’s static pages was a tiresome job.

Welcome to the new version of EminentStyle.com

The site is written semantically and is valid xhtml transitional. Eminent Style v2 is fully optimised for Wordpress 2.6.x and is widget compatible. It also makes use of the hAtom and hCard formats - more on this below.

Adding new items to the portfolio is a breeze with custom fields and the excellent JavaScript library jQuery adding hover effects to the thumbnails. The case study pages also make great use of jQuery with the slide effect displaying screen shots.

The contact page is more useful than just having a contact form. Significantly this makes use of microformats hCard for the contact information and allows users to easily download and store this in vcard format compatible with Outlook and other contact managers.

With the power of Wordpress and the ability to use pages making it a valid CMS, Eminent Style v2 is now fully customisable. Making much use of the core Wordpress features and a few tweaks I am very happy with the result. I hope you like it! Let me know what you think.

Seriously though I have been playing around with the various Magento beta’s over the last few months and I am seriously impressed. This really is e-commerce evolved!

Update - Its arrived!

Microsoft’s forth coming Internet Explorer 8, which recently passed the ACID2 Test, have now changed the direction they were heading in the way IE8 will render web pages. Orginally IE8 was going to cater for existing web pages not conforming to web standards and offer a meta tag or other solution to enable it if required. Officially dragging IE into the 21st century by enabling this by default is definitely a step in the right direction and a statement of intent about IE8 from Microsoft.

Congratulations Microsoft, this is the right decision. Allowing developers to write website the right way with out hacks and work arounds simply makes economical sense.

Using the latest web standards and methodology to design and code the site, Freestyled taps in to the social video site YouTube (utilising the api) adding a depth of content unavailable years ago. Take a look.

freestyled.co.uk 

Check it out here and in my portfolio.

I was approached by AEG Worldwide in June about a proposed design for the Los Angeles Galaxy MySpace profile that was to go live in time for the David Beckham press conference. With important time constraints on the project and a complete brand redesign ready to be implemented it was an exciting time to be working with such a prestigious company.

The profile is live and I hope demonstrates what can be done with MySpace and a great brief. Take a look here Official LA Galaxy MySpace Profile.