When building websites one of the toughest things to master are browser inconsistencies. CSS and HTML on paper aren’t all that difficult. You could purchase a good book and from it get a solid understanding of both.
One thing that I struggled with when I started building sites was how certain things just didn’t look right when I looked at them in Internet Explorer vs Firefox etc.
Then one day I discovered the CSS reset. A CSS reset is basically a set of declarations that you can include in your stylesheet that simply “reset” commonly used elements. These resets usually zero out all margins and padding among other things, which greatly reduces browser inconsistencies.
I recently picked up one of the best peices of photographic equipment I have ever used, the GorillaPod. A GorillaPod is a small bendy camera tri-pod that you can wrap around almost any object. The best part is that it is much smaller than a standard tri-pod so you can take it with you wherever you go.
I recently had the opportunity to try of Squarespace, a hosted CMS solution that allows users to update their website.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck and I think the product is pretty weak as a full blow cms. The main issues are that you are unable to create actual templates, you must simply style their pre-canned code with css, I found this extremely limiting.
Another issue I discovered is that you cannot add editable regions like you can in something like Joomla. It does allow you to add “html injection points”, but these bits are added to every page, you cannot specify which page they go on. This was an issue as we wanted to have an ajax slider appear only on the homepage. The way around this is to add this bit of code to the actual page that the user can update. This is problematic as the user could accidentally mess this bit off code up. Normally I would hard code this to the template where the user woudn’t have access, but in this case Squarespace won’t let you.
On the upside, if you want to manage a small, simple site, Squarespace could work well. Unfortunately there is a monthly fee and a better solution would be something like Wordpress.
