Sorting through my old bookmarks today I came across a useful and pretty exhaustive list of HTML codes thanks to the guys at ascii.cl. It’s amazing how many people don’t reference characters correctly when coding, especially in these multilingual times. Maybe they don’t know, maybe they just don’t care..

For anyone who’s not sure what I mean by an HTML code, it’s a set of standard characters which a browser will interpret as one special character. These begin with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;). It’s all to do with text encoding which is not something that can be concisely explained here, but for instance if you write £ in HTML it’s not guaranteed it will always display as £. You should use the HTML name £ or the HTML number £ to display the £ character.

It’s a popular phrase these days, especially among salesmen, to refer to <insert their new product> as <product you already use> “on steroids”. Faster, more secure, more features, better..

..well I’m not so convinced.

It’s important to keep a sense of perspective when considering your software choices, as with any other choice in life. Why pay for something you don’t need or will only use a fraction of? Is that fancy gimmick really going to make your life easier or help your business earn more?

The Primate web monkeys do like to keep abreast of new bits of internet-related software but these days they’re coming thick and fast, all promising a myriad of features to make your life complete. There are a few simple things to bear in mind when choosing, and reading the company’s website or talking to the salesman for hours on end are not on the list.

Try before you buy: We can’t stress it enough! Can you actually use it? Is it intuitive? Can you break it or find any bugs in it? At Primate Designs we make sure our customers can “have a play” with our software whenever they want to, free of charge, and we don’t see why every company shouldn’t do this.

Make your own features list: Write down what you want from the product, not what you’ve been told you need, or what your current product does, but what you actually must have. Then you can write down all the luxuries and extra features that it would be nice to have. Compare them to the product feature list supplied by the manufacturer.

Read the support forums: There are plenty of products out there at the moment which look fantastic. They may have a really polished user interface and boast a fabulous range of features, but are fundamentally unstable. If the support forums are clogged with people asking questions as to why they cant get something to work or asking what is causing error messages, be worried!

As for “software on steroids” boasting more features than you can shake a mouse at, if you take a considered approach you may find that you barely use the features you have at your disposal currently and suddenly paying for even more seems like less of a great deal.

Remember; less is often more so keep it simple, stupid.

The Primate webmonkeys are practically bonkers with excitement this afternoon after popping out for lunch only to run into none other than the Google Maps camera car, right outside our very own office!

Cut to the chase..

The prospect of appearing on Google Maps new street view feature was just too much to bear, so we had to capture the occasion on camera and guarantee that this little red car with two very happy web developers would be famous. There was nothing for it but to follow him through the back streets of St Albans in a chase befitting the very best TV police show. So until we appear on Google street view (and believe us we’re going to be looking), here’s the photographic evidence:

Google Maps Car - The Chase Is On..

For the most part you won’t give file formats or colour modes a second thought unless you’re a graphic designer, but there are a couple of things to bear in mind when saving images for the web:

File Formats

• GIF - 8-bit pallette, so limited to 256 colours including “transparent”. Lossless compression. Can be animated. Useful for small icons.
• JPG - 24-bit pallette (full colour). Lossy compression can mean poor image quality if set too high but good filesizes as a result. Useful for photographs.
• PNG - 24-bit pallette including alpha-channel transparency which enables any percentage transparency on any pixel regardless of colour supported by all modern browsers. Lossless compression. Ideal for more complex icons or images with crisp edges. The only downside is a relatively large filesize.

So, after yesterday’s post you’ve added your website to some of the search engines and you want to know if they are reading your insightful, inspired and witty content?

Easy!

For either Yahoo or Google you can easily find out what pages they have indexed by using the “site:” command. For example, to find pages of this blog that have been crawled and indexed, you would search for site:blog.primatedesigns.com - Google will display a list of pages, and Yahoo will display it’s site explorer.

There are a few other handy commands to be used on Google in exactly the same way:

• link: - Shows all pages which link to your website’s front page
• cache: - Google’s current cache of your website
• info: - Information that Google has about your website
• related: - Pages which Google believes are similar to your website

To be seen on Google (or any other search engine) they need to be aware your website exists. Nearly all major search engines and directories will have a page where you can submit your website address to be included in their listings. To make things easy for you, we’ve made a list of the most popular ones:

• Google: www.google.co.uk/addurl
• Yahoo: uk.search.yahoo.com/info/submit
• MSN/Live: beta.search.msn.co.uk/docs/submit.aspx