The articles on HTML and CSS brought me back to my migente.com and myspace.com days. Changing background colors, fonts, adding boxes, and frames around photos was all the rage in my youth. Mostly on the HTML front, CSS and the curly brackets make my head spin but I think these articles made it clearer. The way I understood it is; you place certain qualities in a single style sheet and then you just reference certain portions of the sheet in your HTML document. By placing it in a separate sheet you don’t have to read two different styles in one document should you need to edit. This reminds me of the Zen of Python where you want to make things as simple as possible so that anyone can replicate or edit the document.

I really enjoyed the articles on responsive design as well as adaptive layouts.  When I worked at an agency everyone wanted to redesign the websites we made for our clients a few years back in a responsive layout. I imagine it was due to the amount of potential revenue it could drive as opposed to editing their current websites to create adaptive websites. The agency of course would recommend adaptive layouts should the client not want to redesign their recently designed websites. It makes a lot of sense for every website being designed from this point on to be responsive. The sites must be designed with mobile and tablet in mind as Internet usage increases among non-desktop devices. It really is a huge missed opportunity for so many local businesses. As I continue to brand myself as a social consultant that offers web services to local business this will be a big selling point that I’ve underused in my past pitches.

I found the Web Inspector article really interesting. I’ve used it before but I have yet to use the network tab and the files tab, which I will now start to use. I was so fascinated I also read the article on the “Dollars for Docs” project. It’s amazing to think that the drug companies make content very difficult to read to protect their relationships with doctors. It’s equally amazing that with a few keystrokes and clicks you can get a clear and easy to read document with all the information of your health professionals and the financial relationship with the drugs companies. The web inspector tool is the modern day Sherlock Holmes.