Aarron Walter

There’s a fair bit of tedium and redundancy that goes into the set up of a new site. Most web designers start with the same tasks like reseting all default margins, padding, and other values to a common baseline for cross-browser support, you define your layout, wrestle with type, maybe even set up a print style sheet. We often find ourselves repeating what we’ve already done many times over on other projects. Blueprint, a recently released CSS framework created by Norwegian student Olav Frihagen Bjorkoy, seeks to eliminate this common tedium by providing a concise set of style sheets that make setup and design quick and easy.
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Whether you are looking for high quality free fonts, indespensible CSS techniques, tutorials on development topics ranging from Ajax to XHTML, you will find the ultimate resource to nearly every facet of web design at Smashing Magazine. The breadth and depth of resources this site offers is staggering. They choose a topic, then find everything on the web that is worth reading about it. It’s not the indiscriminate list of everything, its the list of everything useful.

Another site that is equally as useful to any web designer is Web Design From Scratch. This site touches on each major topic of the planning, design, and development process of a professional web site, offering clear explanations and real world examples that make each point clear.

I ran across a very useful collection of compressed versions of popular JavaScript libraries today, including Scriptaculous, and Prototype. The Prototype library compresses down from 70k to 30k, which is pretty impressive. I’m becoming more persuaded daily that MooTools is a better option, though, as it offers you the ability to pick and choose which pieces of the library you wish to download, and offers compression on your custom built package resulting in vastly smaller file sizes than the Scriptaculous/Prototype combo.

If you want to compress your own JavaScript or CSS, there are a host of utilities out there for just this task. See comments on this blog post for a laundry list of options.

Most people run their web sites on one of the many inexpensive shared hosting servers running a LAMP environment. If you are like me, you probably have a number of domain names registered, perhaps all parked on the same server pointing to the same site. It would be great to split things up, though, to point one domain to a particular site on your server, and other domains to their own site. Apache lets you do this using a special .htaccess file, which configures the server software on the fly. You can set up unique sites in their own directory on your server, and then
direct Apache to point requests for a particular domain to that folder. Let’s assume the domain you want to redirect is called “somedomain.com”, and the folder on your server where the site files reside is called “somedomain”. Create a plain text file with a text editor and add the following to it:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} somedomain.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !somedomain/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ somedomain/$1 [L]

If you are on a Mac or Linux machine, you will need to save the file as something like htaccess.txt so the operating system does not hide the file (.htaccess is a special name the operating system recognizes, and will try to interpret the commands within). Upload the file to the root directory on your server (sometimes called, htdocs, public_html, or www among other names). Rename it .htaccess, then try accessing somedomain.com in a browser. It should direct your request to the files within the somedomain folder transparently, giving the effect of multiple domains with their own site running on the same shared hosting environment.

Properly notifying the major search engines of the various pages on your site can further improve the organic search engine traffic to your site. A common XML standard has been adopted by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN that makes mapping your site and getting the word out quick and convenient. There are a number of ways to build your XML sitemap, the most tedious of which is by hand. Mac users can use the Rage Google Sitemap Automator, which can not only generate the file for you just by providing the URL to your site, but it can even upload the file to your server and ping Google to let them know where the file is. Notifying Yahoo! has to be done manually via their Site Explorer tool, but the file doesn’t need to change at all. MSN is running behind trying to get a submission site set up, so although they are 100% behind the sitemap protocol, there is no means to submit your file.

WordPress users will be happy to know that an amazing Google Sitemap Generator plugin exists to create and submit your sitemap.xml to Google directly from your admin panel. Installation is simple, but a video tutorial has been created to walk your through the process should you get confused. The file it creates is also fine to submit to Yahoo! for indexing, making publicizing the structure of your site effortless.