House Signs

House Signs are a part of English Tradition that we shouldn't forget. So often you see houses with tacky number bought at the local hardware shop.

Hence, I would like to direct your attention to the best site I have seen:

Clover Signs - These are the nicest house signs I have ever seen. I bought one myself and the service is Fantastic. You get free design with every sign (which often only takes a couple hours) and the signs are hand made. You can even get them with real gold leaf on the hand carved letters.

Back Button in Lightbox.js

Can the back button work in lightbox.js / litebox.js?

I was asked this by a friend who was building an image gallery. For those who don't know, lightbox.js is a cool script built by Lokesh Dhakar for displaying images in a funky AJAX like way. There is just one big problem with the script - that is that the back button doesn't work.

To prove this (true at the time of writing) go to Lokesh's page by clicking this link. Click on the first image underneath where it says "Image Set". Let the lightbox fire, then click through the images. When you get to the end, click your browser back button. You should come back to this page.

Now to see a lighbox which is has the back button enabled, click on Clover Sign Art Gallery. Click any image and scroll for a bit, then hit the back button. It should simply close the lightbox function, and return you to the gallery page.

If you have the technical knowledge to install lightbox, then you should be able to get the scripts etc off the gallery page.

Hey, this took us about 28 hours to work out, so if you use our method - please link to the Clover Signs website's homepage using the words House Signs as the anchor! (You can also link to here if you like.)

There are tons of mods for lightbox.js out there. Both of the ones on Clover Signs are modified. You can see the one with auto scroll on the Custom House Signs Page.

Image and Script Preloading

Heres a great way to preload scripts, images, or anthing you like.

Forget about javascript. Javascript preloaders execute at the top of the page, which doesn't really help. What you need is a script that only starts when the page is loaded.

The answer is simple. Make a hidden div at the bottom of the page and place in it everything you want loaded. This is not for doing things like image swaps (very out of date anyway!) but when you have a very large page, you can load all the script and images for that page on the previous page. It doesn't help if someone comes directly to that page - but is great when someone is surfing your site.

If you want to see an example - check out the art gallery at Clover Signs. All the picutes and the large scripts are preloaded at the hand painted house signs page.

Anyway, I will post more about this gallery next time. Its got some pretty cool features.

How fast do your pages load?

Heres a really interesting white paper on Retail website performance. Looks like we have to make our pages load in 4 seconds now. Just ran round to the local Internet cafe (438k connection) and my site I am working on now loads in under 4 seconds. Hurrah!

Get the paper here.

Useit

I have been reading Useit for a while now, and suggest it to any newcomers to web authoring. You will find a great article at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030630.html or the home page here.

For those of you who are more interested in cool things instead of useful things, check out these pages here:
http://www.uselesspickles.com/jsballs/

http://www.uselesspickles.com/triangles/demo.html

SEO Colouring

If you want a laugh check out this page, where the colour of an SEO is dicussed.

However, if you want some advice on not becoming a bad SEO (even by accident) I strongly suggest you read all the info in Google's webmaster section. You may want to read this article with some good links to webmaster world (get a subscription - its worth it)

Dumb site of the day

I love to spend time looking at dumb sites. You can learn so much (of what not to do) from them. My current favorite is:

http://www.dell.com/html/us/products/purely_you/

Its an amazing demonstration of what you can do with flash. However, Dell doesn't sell Flash, they sell computers. The site doesn't do much to sell computers, because the music is so cool I just sit there and listen to it.

Plus, if you hit your backbutton while browsing, you promtly exit their site. Breaking web standards is not a good idea.

However, they could probably sell this to Macromedia for a demonstration piece!

I'm not knocking Dell (I am using one now) but I think there is a conflict of interest here.

More on web standards later.