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CyberArtisans Web Developers Newsletter |
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Our goal is to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
Your website is one of your key marketing strategies. It's there 24x7, whether you are at your desk or not. With our economy heading into recession, marketing becomes more critical. Customers will be looking at you and your competition very carefully. Now is the time to make sure that when they look at you, you look your best. Is your website showing signs of age? Are some parts a little creaky or not working right? We can fix it and get you ready to compete in a tougher marketplace. Contact us now.
You own Office 2000, XP, or 2003 and you have no reason to upgrade to Office 2007. After all, your current version of Office does what you need and an upgrade costs a lot of money ($270 at Amazon when last checked). Nonetheless, you have business associates with Office 2007. If they send you a native Office 2007 file you won't be able to open it. Even if they remember to save it as an earlier version, your version of Office may still have a problem with it if they use one of the new fonts included with Office 2007. When Office (or any application using fonts) finds a font it doesn't recognize, it substitutes what it thinks is a reasonable alternative. If it doesn't guess right, or if there is no good substitute, the result can be text that doesn't wrap correctly or may even be unreadable in places. Here's an easy (and free!) solution: Download the "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats." Not only does it make Office 2007 documents available to you, but it installs the new fonts on your system, so you get six new fonts that can be used in Microsoft office and any other application on your system. If you are a typography lover, the new fonts are described in detail at Poynteronline, a publication of Poynter Institute, a "school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists." Even if you don't use any version of Office, you can install this and get the fonts. As of this writing, this is a Windows-only release.
IE8 is coming and MS says it will be standards-compliant by default. Does this mean anything to the average website owner? And can "standards-compliant by default" be translated into English? Yes, and yes. First, what does standards-compliant mean? It means that the browser works the way it's supposed to according to the industry group that agrees on operational standards for browsers. Does this mean that IE6 and IE7 don't work according to standards? Well, yes and no. When you open IE6 or IE7, unlike Firefox and Safari, it does not work according to standards unless the person who created your website put something called a DOCTYPE statement at the top of every page and made sure that the DOCTYPE statement says the right thing. IE6 and IE7 will then switch to a mode where they follow the standards. MS has recently announce that IE8 will reverse the logic of previous IE browsers and will work in standards-compliant mode unless told to do otherwise. That is the definition of "standards-compliant by default." What does this mean to the average website owner? Many websites will be just fine. But if your website is quite old, or if it was built by an amateur, it may not work right in IE8. The best way to tell is to look at your site in Firefox (you can download Firefox here if you don't already have it). If your site doesn't look right, contact us -- we'll tell you (for no charge!) what's involved in bringing it into compliance. Most of the time bringing a website into compliance is fairly simple, but in any case, we will tell you what it will cost and you can decide what you want to do. Finally, should you care? Well, yes you should. Even if you have decided not to use any version of IE, approximately 65% of the world still does and can be expected to eventually move up to IE8. IE8 will be released later this year, so plan to check up on your website's compliance some time in 2008.
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