July 23, 2006

Give CSS a try

If you generally use font tags to format the text on your site, give CSS a whirl. It offers more options, and by creating a single CSS file for your whole site, you can format everything all at once — and make changes in one place instead of fifty! The syntax looks weird at first, but Wendy Peck’s fabulous no-crap primer will get you up and running with CSS in about ten minutes.

Added bonus: with all those font tags gone, your pages will download faster. If you use CSS to format those ugly heading tags (<h1>, <h2>) so you can actually use them, you’ll even start to see your Google rank improve.

Already using CSS for fonts? Try it for layouts! Layout Gala has 40 examples to get you started.

Posted by admin in How To at 7:24 pm • comment

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Elsewhere

News on author websites, blogging, and book promotion

Evite Alternatives (via Kat Richardson) ✽

Agent Colleen Lindsay is running a great series on book promotion on her blog. ✽

While we were on vacation last week, agent Nathan Bransford wrote a couple of great posts on author websites and how authors’ blogs influence book sales. There’s some great info in the comments, although there’s also some misinformation about technical issues. (Feel free to ask us about those!) ✽

In the early 21st century, which comes first: the book or the blog? ✽

What makes a good blog? ✽

Text Prefs — a U.K. design firm is conducting a survey on how people like to read onscreen text. Tell them how you like it! They’ve promised to publish the findings so we can all do better at designing things people read. ✽

How to work with a designer and a publicist. ✽

100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media — great overview of how to use the various social media sites to promote yourself. Password management is key here, since you could be signing up for a dozen services or more. Make a spreadsheet! (via our colleague, Jeremy Tolbert) ✽

How to Make the Worst Website — featuring lots of the things we tell you not to do. Here’s one thing you can do today: if you have a splash page on your site (the kind that shows a big image and says “Enter here”), take it down. Let visitors get to the real home page immediately. ✽

Book Launch 2.0 — hilarious video! Are you familiar with all the sites mentioned? (via JKS Communications) ✽

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