Mike Jackson – Australian Family Entertainment

Sibagraphics has completed the code revamp and optimisation for the site of famous Australian children’s and family entertainer, Mike Jackson. Well known for his Dr Knickerbocker song, Mike is now launching his new Uke ‘n Play book and CD kit.

The site has been upgraded to a 3 column div layout in XHTML 1.0 which has streamlined the markup, reducing page size and loading times. Pages have been individually metatagged and matched with content.

LimePlus site

Soil enrichment specialists, LimePlus have launched their new site which promotes their supply, delivery and spreading of organic and inorganic fertilisers on the Sunshine Coast.

The site employs advanced CSS list rollovers and positioning.

More Wallpaper

It’s late winter here on the Sunshine Coast and the irises in our garden are emerging. Download the first iris of the year from the Sibagraphics wallpaper section.

We also took a trip recently to the lovely Peppertree Cottage bed and breakfast and were treated to a dinner of swiss raclette and chocolate fondue fruit by our wonderful hosts, Niki and Ron. Niki is a chef par excellence. They took us to their new house which has an incredible view of the Glasshouse Mountains. One of the pics is also available from the wallpaper section.

S&M Secretarial site

Looking for experienced, professional secretaries to help out on a casual or regular basis? S&M Secretarial run an efficient office assistance service which can complement and supplement your existing business staff. Visit the new S&M Secretarial site and discover how these clever women can assist you.

Their new site features a three column css layout with css rounded corner boxes, designed and coded by Sibagraphics.

Eurofilter Asia Pacific

The new site for Eurofilter Asia Pacific, who design, engineer and sell air filtration equipment, has been completed. Featuring CSS rollovers, the design of the site reflects the company’s logo, colour theme and solid presence in their industry niche.

Cooloola National Park Wallpapers

This week, we made a photographic expedition from Rainbow Beach to Noosa through Cooloola National Park. Download some of the results which have been turned into desktop wallpaper of this beautiful wilderness close to home that we are lucky enough to enjoy.

Styled Scroll Bars

Although IE only styled scroll bars can look ‘pretty’, I’ve lost patience with them because they are a proprietary, non-web standard addition which needs to be dodged round to ensure W3C CSS validation. And since IE only has 87% or thereabouts of the browser market these days and coloured scroll bars only work in DTD Quirks mode … why bother.

Here’s how I include them when desired, in a way that permits validation. Firstly, use a free visual scroll bar styling program like this online tool or this one and obtain the scroll bar css. Then convert it to javascript (HTML Kit has a nifty plugin that does it with a click of a button), save it with a .js file extension and link it in the head of your markup document/s.

<script language="JavaScript" xsrc="js/css.js" mce_src="js/css.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Web design and SEO

At 45 Berea Street, I found a well-written article which summarises important points for effective search engine optimisation which Sibagraphics already employs in its site design. The article emphasises the need to implement search engine strategies from the ground up … through site structure, valid coding, useful metatags and page content.

WordPress 1.5 and other updates

No problems updating the Siblog to WordPress 1.5 …. I managed to retain all mods with no problem. With any luck the spammers will be frustrated further.

While I was at it, I’ve updated Sibagraphics and client forums … slightly more complex but very worthwhile. I’ve also implemented some considerable css compression by (1) converting all hex colours to shorthand names eg. #003366 becomes #036, and (2) including line-height sizes in font styles eg. font: italic bold .75em/1.2em verdana, sans-serif.