Invex Design | Blog

Attaching a CSS Style Sheet to Your Site

Invex09 — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:34:04 +0000

This post will cover how to attach an external CSS Style Sheet to your website. Controlling all your styles through an external style sheet is the largest advantage of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), as it allows you to completely separate style from content. CSS Style Sheets allow updates to spread quickly throughout your site as updating the style sheet instantly updates all of the attached web pages.

A CSS Style Sheet has a .css file extension (ie styles.css) and should be placed somewhere in the root folder of your website. Once you have an external style sheet setup for your site, you can link your pages to that style sheet by placing the following line of code between the and tags of your web pages:

"styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

So if you have this style sheet linked to every page on your site and you want to change the color of links from blue to red, making one change in the style sheet will update the link color on every page in your site.

Are you using Dreamweaver? Adobe Dreamweaver has a CSS Panel with an Attach Style Sheet button that will automatically insert this code for you. Open up the page you’d like to attach a style sheet to, and then in the CSS Panel, find the button shown below:

Clicking this button will prompt you to browser for your style sheet. You should then choose “Add As: Link” and leave the media field blank and your link tag will be generated for you. There are two methods for attaching a style sheet, link and import, but link is the most common and suffices for this basic tutorial.

Hopefully, this tutorial familiarized you with the basics of linking an external style sheet to your site. If you have any questions feel free to comment below or use our request a tutorial page if there is a topic you would like us to expand on. Your feedback is appreciated!

** NOTE ** The href attribute in the provided link tag assumes your style sheet is in the same folder as your web page. You can specify this attribute as a relative or an absolute path to your style sheet if it’s located in a different folder than your web page.

Changing Your Nameservers

Invex09 — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:40:15 +0000

University of Illinois Womens Club Basketball

Invex09 — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:23:29 +0000

Over the weekend, we launched the new website for the University of Illinois Womens Club Basketball team. The website was developed using primarily XHTML and CSS in combination with jQuery for an interactive calendar. The team wanted a schedule that would be easy to update for someone who wasn’t web-savvy. Thus, we designed the website so that the team schedule is connected through the back-end to a Google calendar. So anyone on the team can log into the team Google account, make changes on an easy-to-use Google calendar, and the changes will be reflected on the website. Pretty cool? We think so.

Check out the site at:
www.wcbillinois.com

Adding Meta Tags to Your Website

Invex09 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:08:22 +0000

This post will cover adding some basic meta tags to your website which provide search engines like Google a quick overview of your website’s content. With search engine rankings becoming increasing important to a successful online presence, following this simple and easy tutorial can go a long way for you and your website.

Meta tags are used as a way of organizing a website’s metadata, commonly defined as “data about data.” Basically metadata serves as a means to help organize the world wide web. It consists of specific information about a website presented in structured meta tags and thus provides a universal standard across the web. Meta tags can be found in the header of your website, or between the and tags. By default, most web editors today will place the meta tag for content-type in a new document when you create it:

"Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Also by default, you are given a space for the title of your web page:

<span class="text">Insert Page Title Here</span>

This title is displayed on the top of your browser window and is also used as the link text for your website in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Your page title should serve as a good heading for the content of your website, usually containing both the title of your business as well as that particular page within the site.

Two very important meta tags are the keywords and content tags shown below:

"Description" content="Brief site description" />
"Keywords" content="Comma separated keywords and phrases" />

The description is used by search engines to give a brief summary of your web page on search result pages while the keywords are a factor in determining whether or not the content on your website is relevant to a particular search.

Below is a sample header that can be used as a template for you to go off when creating the metadata for new web pages. The sample contains a language meta tag that, while not as useful for sites that are in English, doesn’t hurt to add to your header.

Sample Header with Meta Tags:


"Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<span class="text">Insert Page Title Here</span>
"Description" content="Brief site description" />
"Keywords" content="Comma separated keywords and phrases" />

Feel free to leave a comment below with any questions or feedback. For more information about the SEO services offered at Invex Design, check out our services page.

** NOTE ** There is actually a specific meta tag for page title, however its rarely used in the US and we highly recommend sticking to the basic title tag mentioned above. For more information about the matter, check out this article.

MalwareBytes Deleted by Spyware

Invex09 — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:55:03 +0000

Earlier we covered how to download, install, and setup MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, which is one of the best, most popular free tools available to help protect your computer. Unfortunately, because of that “most popular” part, many malware and spyware programs attempt to disable MalwareBytes specifically. We have compiled some helpful tips in case you run into this problem.

Basically, because MalwareBytes is so widely-used and effective against harmful software, the friendly people who develop your viruses and adware/spyware (thats a joke … there are many adjectives that could be used to describe these people but friendly definitely isn’t one of them ) now target MalwareBytes and attempt to disable it before you can use it. These harmful programs will accomplish this task by blocking or deleting mbam.exe, the executable file that runs MalwareBytes once its installed.

If this has happened to you, when you attempt to run MalwareBytes nothing will happen. You can solve this problem by changing the file extension from .exe to .com which will allow the file to still be executed as before, but effectively trick the spyware program into thinking the file is not there. So if you have MalwareBytes installed but nothing happens when you try to run the program, take the following steps:

Navigate to the MalwareBytes Folder location under Program Files which is usually: C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware
Look for the file mbam.exe. If the file is there skip to the next step, otherwise, if the file is missing, download a version that has already been changed from .exe to .com from one of our Invex servers:

Download “mbam.com”Then move this file to the location you found in step 1 and skip to step 5.

Click on the file and hit F2 (Rename) or right click on the file and selected Rename
Change the filename from mbam.exe to mbam.com (refer to the footer of this post if you are unable to change the file extension)
Run the file mbam.com to start up MalwareBytes Anti-Malware

Well hopefully these steps helped you clear up any problems you may have had with MalwareBytes. As usual, leave a comment if you have any questions or are unclear about parts of the tutorial. We always appreciate your feedback. Thanks!

** NOTE ** In order to rename a file and change its extension, you must have “Hide extensions for known file types” unchecked in your folder options. You can find this setting here: Tools → Folder Options … → View → Advanced Settings: and again it must be disabled.