The Virtual Promote Gazette #217: SES Chicago - A Personal Perspective

Gazette #217: Dec 29, 2004

SES Chicago - A Personal Perspective

Topics in this issue

· A Departure from the Norm
· SES Chicago - A Personal Perspective
· CSS and Website Building - The Next Step Up
· Moving Forward
· Payment Due Notice
· How To Unsubscribe

A Departure from the Norm

By Ron Carnell

Having just written the title for this introduction, it suddenly strikes me as being a bit silly.

I wanted to write a few words explaining that this issue of the Gazette is going to be a little different than usual. Whereas I usually try to write several shorter articles, having recently returned from the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, I'm instead only going to write one article, a fairly lengthy one covering SES. Of course, that one article is still going to cover a lot of different topics, from ethics to links to redirects and more, so those with limited time can still read it in bits and pieces if needed.

That would, indeed, be a departure from our norm . . . if the Gazette really had a norm. Truth is, every issue of the Gazette for the past several months has been a little different each time, as we continue to struggle to find our voice. I keep trying slightly different approaches each issue, in hopes something will click with 150,000 different readers and every one of them will write to tell me so. That hasn't happened, yet.

Gazette Forum

That rather verbose link leads directly to the Gazette Feedback forum at SEF. You can use that, or write me directly at ronc@piptalk.com, to let us know when you think we've done something right. That way, we can keep doing it. Or, of course, you can let us know when we've done something wrong, so we can stop doing it. Suggestions are even welcome, if you happen to think of something we haven't thought to try yet.

Without your feedback, I'm pretty much just shooting in the dark. So, please, send me a flashlight? With your help, we might actually be able to find our norm. :-)

SES Chicago - A Personal Perspective

by Ron Carnell

I arrived in Chicago late Sunday evening, my little Miata overflowing with enough luggage to last the four days of the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference. The 150 mile drive had been largely uneventful. I didn't know it at the time, but it would prove to be the only uneventful hours of a very hectic week.

The Hyatt Regency at McCormick Place is reputedly the best hotel in Chicago. I'm told if you go to priceline.com and bid on a 5-star hotel in Chicago, you're pretty much guaranteed to get the Hyatt. There just aren't that many competing. When I pulled into their half-circle drive, therefore, it wasn't a great surprise to find three people waiting at the door to help unload the car. The six-foot-four doorman, bundled inside a blood-red coat and hat against the bitterly cold and brisk winds coming off Lake Michigan, hardly raised a brow as I unloaded bag after bag and quickly filled his cart. I did notice a slight twinkle of amusement in his eyes when I added my own pillow to the top of the growing heap.

Emptied in surprisingly short order (those cold winds discourage loitering), the Miata was quickly whisked to valet parking and, after a joyously easy check-in, my mound of stuff was delivered to my nineteenth floor room.

The room was nice enough. It's dominant feature was the large bay window, some eight feet tall by maybe six feet wide, with a very impressive view of the city lights. To the left of the glimmering lights, comprising perhaps a quarter of the view, was a dark mass of nothingness I knew would be Lake Michigan come sunrise.

There was some small lettering at the base of the window that said, "Please don't open window." That suggested it could be opened, so of course, I had to figure out how. It took some finagling, but a few levers on the side were released and I soon discovered the huge window would pivot outwards from the top when pushed at the bottom. When you're staring down nineteen floors, with nothing between you and open pavement except the night air, and don't yet know just how far the window will swing outwards, one tends to push rather gently at first. As it turned out, the window opened to a gap of only ten or twelve inches, insuring that any hysterical jumpers at the Hyatt would necessarily be a lot skinnier than me. It also turned out that the merely brisk winds at ground level were enough to sorely rattle heavy plate glass a few hundred feet higher. The window didn't stay open very long.

I unpacked quickly. Clothes. Pillow. Coffee machine. Yea, I said coffee machine. The room came with a tiny little thing that would make a single cup of morning java, which is to say, just enough to be a mean tease. I brought a 12-cup machine and enough coffee to last the week. After unpacking my laptop, I spent several fruitless minutes trying to get on the Internet. The hotel advertised a wireless connection, but I would later discover that was only for select areas and didn't include the rooms. After I discovered a short cat-5 Ethernet cable in the desk drawer, I tethered myself to the wall and was rewarded with access to the hotel system. After agreeing to an additional charge of $9.95 a day, I found myself breathing a little easier as my browser home page appeared on screen.

I spent a few minutes letting friends know my room number and assuring them I had arrived safely, then headed downstairs to do some exploring. The shops were closed. The dining room was closed. The bar was hopping.

Apparently no one told the manager there was a convention scheduled, because the bar was badly understaffed (and would be all week). I managed to get a Bacardi and coke, no small feat, and found a table, which bordered on the miraculous. The loud laughter and raucous joking was infectious, and I found myself smiling like a Cheshire cat as I cast about the room, looking for someone, anyone, that I might recognize from on-line. Unfortunately, half the people looked vaguely familiar, the other half were complete strangers, and the sea of faces broke in waves too irregular to be sure which was which. I soon realized that, short of an avatar walking into the room, I wasn't going to find anyone I knew like this.

I returned to my room just before midnight, barely in time to make last-call for room service. A salad, a sandwich, a few posts in various forums, and it was a bit after two in the morning before my head finally hit MY pillow.

Registration for the conference was to begin at eight o'clock. I arose early, drank a pot of coffee, showered, drank another pot of coffee, dressed, and finally headed downstairs about a quarter to eight. Sometime in the middle of the night, the tooth fairy had surreptitiously placed signs throughout the hotel hallways directing people to the SES venue.

So, I followed the signs. And followed some more signs. And continued to follow the signs. I think we went through at least two zip codes before finally walking (okay, in my case, nearly crawling) across an expansive bridge that spanned a freeway and led to our final destination.

There were eight or nine lines at the registration desk and, facing exhaustion, I naturally chose the shortest. Only later did I realize the lines were arranged alphabetically and, of course, I wasn't in the one for the letter C. Except that wasn't the right line either, it turned out, because press and speakers were being handled in a different room. Somewhere "over there," I was told. I found it. Someone had spelled my name wrong, meaning they first couldn't find my papers and, when they did find them, had to make a new badge with the correct spelling. About this time, my uneventful drive to Chicago was looking mighty good. I would have embraced a little boredom, especially if it meant I could sit down doing it.

Miraculously, I somehow made it in time to attend my first conference session at nine o'clock.

----- The Future of Online Advertising ----

"Online Advertising and Search Forecast: Projecting Growth through 2009" was the daunting name of the session, led by Gary Stein, a senior analyst with JupiterResearch, with added input from his colleague, Niki Scevak. Niki would also chair my second session, held in the same room (thank goodness I didn't have to move again), titled "Gathering of the Tribes: Agencies, Engines, and Advertisers Tackle Points of Friction."

The number crunchers really like those long titles, and these two sessions were surely dominated by a whole lot of number crunching. Any web publisher who made it through 2004 already knows that online advertising is finally, after several years of stagnation, rising rather nicely. And anyone involved in PPC already knows the cost of keywords rose a lot in 2004 and won't be surprised to hear it will continue to rise dramatically in 2005, before beginning to rise more slowly in 2006. The big surprises weren't necessarily with What is going to happen, but rather with Why JupiterResearch expects it to happen.

Here, for example, is one interesting observation I garnered.

In general, there is a rule that many things reach a critical mass when adoption exceeds twenty percent. With most of the U.S. on dial-up, for example, there's little motivation to create either content or advertisements that require faster connections. But, with little content or advertisements, there's no great reason for people to move to broadband. Chicken and egg stuff. The twenty percent rule says that the impetus to create more demanding content will only surface when the broadband adoption become great enough, after which the better content will impel more and more people to adopt broadband, creating a snowball effect.

Well, guess what? Broadband in the U.S. now exceeds thirty percent, and JupiterResearch expects it to grow much more quickly than in the past few years. Broadband, in other words, is over the hump. And, yea, that's going to have a big impact on the way we do digital business.

There was, obviously, a great deal more covered in these two sessions, and I have already outlined several articles for future Gazettes exploring advertising on the Internet. We usually tend to focus more on e-commerce sites, which is actually a bit surprising when you consider that most of MY sites are content based and rely on ad revenues to survive. And I suspect I'm not alone. There are a lot of people in the forums, I know, who are sitting in the same boat with me. In the next few months, we'll be talking a lot more about where that boat is taking us.

Fast forward. The rest of Day One was something of a blur, with lunch consisting of wandering the halls, and the remaining two sessions spent trying to stay awake. Not that they were necessarily bad, so much as just really basic.

The trek from the convention center back to the rooms hadn't grown any shorter. On the contrary, the tooth fairly apparently didn't think we would need signs to lead us back the way we had come, and an unfortunate zig left when I should have zagged right led me on a tour of something called the South Building, adding at least one more zip code to my journey. I ran into a few online friends (almost literally), but was almost relieved when they said they were rushing to a SEMPO meeting after just a few moments of chatting together. My room was screaming my name.

---- Ethical Search Marketing? ----

Tuesday was more of the same.

The most notable session of the day was "Black Hat, White Hat & Lots of Gray," an hour and fifteen minutes of exploring the often blatant, sometimes subtle, differences between 'good' SEO techniques and 'bad' ones. Greg Boser and Todd Friesen represented the black arts and discussed things like cloaking, blog spamming, and referral log attacks. My good friends, Jill Whalen and Alan Perkins took the high road, explaining why deception hurts everyone eventually, and Mikkel deMib Svendsen (a colleague from the old SEF days) straddled the gray fence and presented an hilarious slideshow of hats that had the audience in stitches. Even Danny Sullivan, who moderated the panel, got in a few good zingers.

Quick anecdote time. Three of the panelists, each in a different color hat, offered their own personal evidence that Google is more interested in relevancy than in rules. Each had seen instances of a well-branded site being caught with their hands in the SEO cookie jar, only to have Google turn a blind eye to their infractions. Two had been dropped from the index for a whole day, before being returned with no further penalty. Searchers expect to see certain big brands in certain searches, and those sites seem to pretty much have a get-out-of-jail-free card. No matter their sins, they are relevant enough that Google wants them included.

That, I think, tells us something pretty important.

Someday, when I'm feeling particularly masochistic, I'll probably sit down and write a Gazette article about the seemingly eternal clash between Black Hat and White Hat SEO. If someone could follow my posts over the past six or seven years, across multiple forums and venues, they'd certainly find it's not a topic I necessarily avoid. Like a certain Pennsylvania groundhog, the debate raises its head at almost alarmingly regular intervals. I have little doubt that, sooner or later, the Gazette will join the fray. And I will likely be ridden out of town on a fence rail, no matter on which side of the fence I might land.

Tuesday night in Chicago was spent with friends.

Ten of us caught a 7:30 shuttle into the bowels of the city, bent on a little Italian restaurant where we had dinner reservations. We had to walk about two blocks, and if my feet hadn't been hurting so badly I might have been a little more concerned about wandering the streets of a big city at night. I don't know Chicago, but I know L.A. and New York well, and there are parts of every big city where you just don't go. Was this one of them? Apparently not, since no one got mugged. I know, because I counted heads at the table just to be sure.

The meal was great, and the tiramisu alone was almost worth the two-block walk, but of course the real purpose of the evening was to commune with long-time friends I was meeting for the very first time. We exchanged gossip, techniques, war stories, family histories, and all in all, had a delightful time. I'll come back to this dinner, these people and others, a little latter.

---- CSS, SEO, and Other Four-Letter Words ----

Wednesday was, for me, the biggest day of the conference, with many of the best session of the week scheduled back to back.

First up for Wednesday was "Web Standards, Good Design & SEO: You Can Have It All." Danny Sullivan moderated a panel of four, including Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Shari Thurow, Matt Bailey (who had been at our dinner Tuesday night), and the star of the show, Eric Meyer, acknowledged guru and voice of the web standards world.

A bit of history is probably required to understand the significance of this session. Earlier this year a blogger ( http://compooter.org/article/68/craptastic-SES-2004/ ) wrote a rather scathing review of a session at SES San Jose, which was subsequently picked up and further detailed in Eric's blog ( http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/08/13/silly-expert-opinions/ ). You'll have to follow a whole lot of links, especially from Eric's pages, to get your head wrapped around the whole story, but suffice it to say, for a time it looked like all-out war between search marketers and web standard adherents. That didn't happen, however. Instead, the level of civility was impressive, and the ensuing dialog helped bring a deeper understanding to people in both camps.

It also, of course, resulted in an invitation from Danny to Eric to speak in Chicago.

Of all the sessions attended during the four days of SES Chicago, this was hands-down my favorite. And not because I necessarily agreed with everything presented, either. Eric, for example, cited a statistic that converting to good CSS design would usually result in an average fifty percent reduction in page size. I wanted to ask if that reduction was the result of replacing font tags with styles, which everyone agrees is good, or with replacing tables with div elements, which is where most of the web standards people seem to be arguing we should be headed and I (personally) think is, at best, an elusive goal.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to ask that question. Every single one of the speakers went over their presentation time, leaving almost no room for questions at the end. Pity, too. Tim Mayers made some very enlightening comments about Yahoo's lack of interest in things like page size and code validation that definitely deserved some follow-up. I can only hope Danny repeats this session in future conferences and, perhaps, finds a way to extend the Q & A time.

I've made enough notes from this one session, I think, to cover about six different articles for upcoming Gazette issues. Of course, I should also make mention of Diane Vigil's earlier article on adopting Web Standards ( http://www.searchengineforums.com/gazette/issue-213/ ) as a good starting point. And, she makes some equally interesting points in this issue's article. Web standards and CSS is a topic I would like to see greatly expanded in the next few months.

---- Advanced Link Building ----

My next session was the "Advanced Link Building Forum," moderated by Chris Sherman, and attended by Greg Boser, Debra O'Neil-Mastaler, Eric Ward, and representing the engines, Jen Fitzpatrick from Google and Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves.

This was definitely one of the better and more informative sessions, covering a lot of things I think one rarely sees revealed in the online forums. I was particularly impressed with Greg's somewhat blasé attitude about reciprocal linking. It's not that they're bad, he said off-handedly, it's just that they're not very cost effective. You can spend the same amount of time elsewhere for much better returns. This probably resonated particularly well for me because, in seven years, I've asked for exactly one link to a site (from Yahoo, back when it was free) and today routinely turn down every reciprocal link request sent my way. There are better ways, and the panel in this session seemed to know all of them.

Need I even say it? Yes, there will be a number of articles in coming months, covering some of the more advanced methods for building link popularity. To whet your appetite, here's a quick one-liner that was (perhaps accidentally?) dropped during the session. An often overlooked source for really good links is the vast array of online school newspapers being published across the web. Many are even published on .edu domains, adding a little extra boost.

---- You Can't Really Get There From Here? ----

The next session was "Redirects and Rewriting," a deep look into the sometime more technical and esoteric needs of running a web site. Used to be these were things no one needed to know and, indeed, redirects got something of a bad rap in the Nineties as a tool of spammers. The introduction of link popularity into search gave redirects a new lease on life, however, and the inclusion of dynamic content in the indexes turned the arcane art of rewriting URLs into a needed skill for any practicing SEO.

Detlev Johnson moderated this session, with Matt Bailey, Jake Baillie, Bruce Clay, Rob Sullivan, and Yahoo's Jonathan Glick presenting their takes on the state of the art.

The Gazette has covered redirects a few times in the past few months, particularly as it has related to WWW domains, and we'll almost certainly have more to say about it in future months as well. There's a whole lot to say, not just on the technical side, but more importantly, on the deeper understanding side. Knowing WHY they have become so important, and how they related to duplicate content filters, has become vital for good SEO. And those are the kinds of things we'll be covering very soon.

In the meantime, to again whet your appetites, I'll briefly report on the presentation and announcement by Jon Glick, from Yahoo. After a rather tumultuous beginning, the new Yahoo search engine is now handling redirects correctly (at least according to Jon). When redirecting Page A to Page B, this is what you should expect to see:

A to B, with a 302 (Moved Temporarily) response code : Page B will be added to the index, but the URL will be listed as A and all link credit will remain with A.

A/ to B/deep, with a 301 (Moved Permanently) response code : In this instance, we're talking about redirecting a home page to a deeper page, as so often seems to happen when a "home page" default ends up being a CGI script in some other folder. Strangely, in my opinion, Yahoo has decided to treat this exactly as they treat a 302. The home page URL will be listed in the SERPs, but the deeper linked page's content will be indexed.

A to B, with a 301 (Moved Permanently) response code : Page A will be dropped entirely from the index, and page B will be added in its place. All links and anchor text attributed to page A will be credited to page B.

A meta-refresh, coded directly in the page, can now take the place of a server-side redirect. Considering how badly meta-refreshes have been abused by spammer in the past, this is surprising news. But it's also good news, especially for the many webmasters who don't have access to server level redirects. A meta-refresh of 1 second or less will be treated as a 301, while anything longer than 1 second will be considered a 302.

Wednesday's sessions closed with an "Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan," which frankly, was more entertaining than educational. Danny's a very funny guy, and an hour spent with him running down the aisles with a microphone talking to the audience brought a few smiles and laughs. There was a smaller crowd than I would have guessed, and I soon learned why. Three different vendors, it seemed, were giving open bar parties at various places throughout the city. Even Danny couldn't compete against free booze.

It had been a long day and the walk back to the hotel had somehow, magically, grown longer by at least half a mile. I had an early dinner, joined some friends in the bar for a delightful demonstration of making wire jewelry, then retired to my room relatively early, if only to avoid the embarrassment of collapsing in public.

---- Advanced Search Term Research ----

Almost our entire last Gazette ( http://www.searchengineforums.com/gazette/issue-216/ ) was devoted to selecting keywords for an SEO campaign, so it was pretty much a given I would attend the "Advanced Search Term Research Issues" session being offered on the final day of SES. I wasn't disappointed.

The session was moderated by Detlev Johnson, with Christine Churchill and Dan Thies speaking, and vendors James Lamberti from comScore Networks and David Warmuz from Telliun describing their keyword tools.

Honestly, I was a bit surprised at the depth of knowledge presented in this session. Really good stuff. Since this was an advanced session, there wasn't a lot of emphasis on why keywords are so important (which was in large part the focus of our last Gazette), but more detail on how they can be better used in the marketing phase.

For example, Christine briefly talked about the how a particular visitor's stage in the buying process can often be determined by what keywords they used to find your site.

* Problem recognition
* Information search
* Evaluation of Alternatives
* Purchase decision

The keywords you target can often be mapped directly to these four stages and, in doing so, you can create a roadmap for the visitor to follow . . . one that should eventually lead to an exchange of cash. The key, Christine explained, is to recognize how various search terms reveal the visitor's current goal and then take advantage of that knowledge by helping them reach THAT goal.

After our last issue, it's unlikely I'll immediately return to keyword research, but I rather suspect that itch won't remain scratched for more than a month or two. I have a lot of good notes, thanks to Christine and Dan, and I don't intend to let them set too long. I also have to admit that David piqued my interest in the keyword tool available at Trelliun, and you just might find an in-depth review of said tool in the very near future.

During the half hour break between conferences, I ran into Bill Hartzer, another long-time moderator at SEF, and we spent some twenty minutes swapping stories in the bitter cold winds a stone's throw from the shores of Lake Michigan. Bill has attended quite a number of SES conferences, and was able to add some significant insight into what was new, what was different, and what was the same. And, of course, it was just cool to finally meet Bill in person.

---- I'm So Confused! ----

The final session of SES Chicago, "I'm So Confused," was returning after a short absence in recent conferences, and was moderated by Danny Sullivan. Danny explained that, after four days of concentrated SEO advice, especially when some was often conflicting, it was easy for people to get a little confused on their best course. This session was a pure Q & A format, designed to help sort out the confusion. Jill Whalen and Jon Glick, from Yahoo, were available to answer questions, though the moderator, Danny, was equally quick to jump in with his take on things as well.

The crowd was surprisingly small, and it turned out only two people in the room were there because they were confused over conflicting advice. Most of the some two dozen present were veterans of the SEO industry, which certainly made for some interesting questions.

Most of the hour, it seemed, centered around linking, and especially reciprocal linking. There's definitely an article in there, but I don't think it's one that can wait to be written. Jon, from Yahoo, made some very enlightening comments that cry out to be reported immediately.

Perhaps the most important revelation, and for me certainly the most surprising, surfaced when Danny rhetorically asked Jon if Yahoo looked at all the links pointing to a site or only at links pointing to a specific page. Danny thought he knew the answer, and to his credit, he only stuttered a little when Jon said Yahoo looked at both.

Say what?

One of the keys to understanding link popularity has always been to make people understand that search engines rank pages, not sites. Jon was now telling us that Yahoo looked at the sum total of links to a site to . . . what? He didn't say why, and I think we can only surmise it will relate to establishing authority and hub sites. It's a new wrinkle, and one that bears further investigation.

When the discussion turned to site-wide linking, where every page on a site contains a link to another site (often in the footer), Jon confirmed what many have long suspected. To use his own succinct verdict, "One site, one vote!"

In other words, link popularity can't be build by getting thousands of links from one source. One site, one vote. Jon was quick to add that multiple, different instances of anchor text from the same site could still affect rankings, as each would essentially add to the body text of the target page. That means Yahoo isn't actually ignoring those thousand links from the same site, it's just not using them as some hoped, to build increased link popularity. One site, one vote. It would be nice, now, if we could get similar confirmation from Google?

I would like to have stuck around and asked Jon some questions after Danny adjourned the session (and the conference), but instead I rushed downstairs to the Site Clinic, where Elisabeth Osmeloski was moderating, and Christine Churchill and Jake Baillie were tearing apart sites (constructively, of course) proffered by the audience. Elisabeth was a long time moderator at SEF, before taking over as an Admin at Danny's new SEW forums, meaning we had worked together for many years. I had repeatedly missed the opportunity to meet her over the course of four days and was determined it wouldn't happen again. It didn't, but not by much. Our meeting consisted of a few dozen rushed words, as Elisabeth was hurrying out the door to catch a plane. The conference was over after all, and she was but one of many bound for home.

---- Tying the Loose Ends ----

Unlike Elisabeth and so many others, I was spending one more night at the Hyatt, waiting until Friday morning to head back to Michigan. I dislike driving at night and, let's face it, I didn't exactly pack lightly enough to make a quick getaway before Thursday's checkout time.

I was the sole table in the vast Hyatt dining room that evening and Victoria, my server through much of the week, confirmed the hustle and bustle of some one thousand conference guests would be sorely missed by most of the staff. Winter, she said, is generally pretty slow. Returning to my room for the final time, the expansive halls and high ceilings almost seemed to echo more, rather than less, with the sounds of the few isolated stragglers like myself wandering the nearly empty corridors.

The abrupt change in pace not only offered some time for reflection, but almost seemed to demand it. What was I to take away from SES Chicago 2004?

In a sense, I think this article almost serves as a metaphor for my first SES conference. A bit longer than I hoped, a bit less focused than I expected, and yet littered with enough new discoveries to keep me trekking through several zip codes every day of the event.

Beyond the obvious, however, what I was to take away from Chicago, I think, was a greater sense of humility.

SES is as much about networking with people, I think, as it is about learning new tips or better strategies. I met a lot of people in Chicago. Some were old friends I've know digitally for years, others were new acquaintances that will likely get more of my online attention in the future, and everyone single one of them, I think, surprised me in some small way. A few offered unexpected help and insight apart from their roles as speakers, a few really went out of their way to make me feel comfortable in the midst of strangers, and everybody, almost without exception, amazed me with their insight and intelligence and grace.

These are the best and brightest in our industry. They are spread across the Internet, some in different forums, some in different communities, some seen only in occasional articles, some so busy they rarely surface at all, but for four days they came together to teach, to party, to impress, to laugh, and to share.

It was a good four days.

CSS and Website Building - The Next Step Up

Guest Article by Diane Vigil

The default display of browsers often leaves something to be desired in the way of website "look and feel" -- huge H tag fonts, Times-like text and margin of a few pixels around the edge of the browser window. At a minimum, Cascading Style Sheets allow you to change the appearance of these elements, making website design easier, shortening download time, and allowing for faster updates.

Since I'm not sure what level of CSS our Gazette readers may be using, let's start with some basics. For you CSS whizzes, please note that we'll cover *some* basics in order to encourage readers to use CSS. It isn't a complete reference nor a clinic in advanced coding.

---- External Style Sheets ----

Rather than plunking your CSS in every page (and updating all pages with each change), place your styles in an external file; this will allow you to change just that one file rather than every page every time. Just:

(1) put your styles in a text file, save as "yourstyles.css"
(2) in the <head> section of all the pages, reference the stylesheet:

<link rel="StyleSheet" href="path/to/yourstyles.css" type="text/css">

You *can* use the full URL: "http://yoursite.com/yourstyles.css" but if you're working on a website on your local computer, be aware that this will call the stylesheet from the server, not your machine.

---- Some Basic Styles ----

Some basic styles for your style sheet:

body {color:#000; background:#fff; font-family: verdana,helvetica,sans-serif; margin: 0; padding: 0;}

The above says that, between the <body> and </body> tags (the entire browser-visible page), the text will be black (color:#000), the background white (background:#fff), the font Verdana (or, if Verdana is not available, Helvetica or whatever other sans-serif font is available), and that there will be no margin or padding around the page.

Note: some designers like to write CSS thusly:

body {
color:#000;
background:#fff;
font-family: verdana,helvetica,sans-serif;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

To be honest, this adds to the weight of your CSS file on CSS-heavy sites ... and after you've scanned a few styles, it can get confusing. Write your CSS however you'd like; I like mine on one line. I personally prefer not to have a CSS file that, if printed, would be taller than me. :-)

Now that the font is specified, we can control size, color, etc for specific tags:

h1 {color:#006; font-weight:normal; font-size:18px;}

Read: every H1 tag on the website shall have an 18 pixel unbolded dark blue font. Note that the H1 tage will inherit the Verdana font from the Body tag. Change the above and it changes every usage of the H1 tag throughout the site. Pretty neat!

Except that Ron Carnell has reminded me that Netscape4.x browsers don't take to all CSS specifications in the body tag. So, if your target market may use NS4.x, then you'll have to fudge it a bit by specifying each of your tags that will contain text:

p,td,ul,ol,blockquote,div {color:#000; font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:12px;}

(There are issues with font sizes, browsers, monitors and screen resolution but, while important, they are beyond our scope here, so I've included a link explaining those issues at the bottom of this article.)

One more: let's say we'd specified all of our links to be green, but want our navbar (menu) links to be red, bold and not underlined. We can do this by making up a special usage (or class):

a.navbar:link, a.navbar:visited {color:#ff0; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none}

And we apply it thus:

<a href="home.html" class="navbar">Home</a>
<a href="page1.html" class="navbar">Page 2</a>
<a href="page2.html" class="navbar">Page 2</a>

---- A Step Beyond ----

Now, while we can continue like this for every element on our pages, and make up more as we go along, CSS allows something else that is pretty useful. That is, rather than repeat class="navbar" for every menu link, we can isolate the specific region where we want to apply our navbar specification. Assuming that we're going to put the navbar in a table cell (td):

td.navbar a {color:#f00; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none}

This says that, where the table cell (td) has applied to it the class "navbar" (<td class="navbar">), any "a" tag (link) will be red, bold and without an underline:

<table>
<tr>
<td class="navbar">
<a href="home.html">Home</a>
<a href="page1.html">Page 2</a>
<a href="page2.html">Page 2</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Now, this has cut down on the amount of CSS needed to make the navbar specifications "take" -- very nice for feeding "clean" code to search engines while making the code easier to deal with on your end -- but there's something far more interesting about this.

Rather than creating only *general* specifications for your site (e.g., all bolded words are blue), you could apply a *specific set of styles* to every section of your site -- header, footer, menu, whatever. Given that CSS also allows you to specify how far away from other elements each section would be (e.g., the footer is 150 pixels below everything else on the page), such element-specific CSS enables you to easily manipulate the look -- and even the placement -- of your page elements simply by updating your external CSS file. Nice, eh?

Well, I said "easily". It's not so easy at first, but once you get the hang of it, I'm guessing it'll not only shorten your website design/development time, but will make you fall in love with it. You may even join that chorus of "Web Standards" folk who push for browsers that display coding correctly according to the W3org. Some designers have been die-hard holdouts, preferring to support old browsers in favor of adapting to new devices like PDAs and Internet-enabled phones. The decision today, I think, is: who is your target market(s) and what browsers and devices to they use?

** Pertinent Links:

W3Schools.org CSS Reference
http://www.w3schools.com/css/

CSS Font-Sizes Explained
Font sizes can change with the user's browser settings
http://www.bigbaer.com/css_tutorials/css_font_size.htm

A List Apart
http://www.alistapart.com/
The famous repository of advanced CSS techniques.

------

Diane Vigil (best known as DianeV in the forums) has been coaching others in the industry for a number of years, and is founder of DianeV. Web Design Studio ( http://dianev.com ) in Los Angeles. She is a long-time proponent of what is today called "holistic web design" - the use of a variety of disciplines to create effective market-oriented websites.

The Virtual Promote Gazette #217: SES Chicago - A Personal Perspective

Gazette #217: Dec 29, 2004

SES Chicago - A Personal Perspective

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