[Mike Smith]

Thanks, Jameson. The w3schools.com stuff looks interesting, and I’ll pass it through.

On the iWeb side, I had the impression that this was more of a template-driven tool for beginners not planning to go too far into web work, while my colleague’s mid-term aim is to get to a professional level in this to match his pro print work.

I was wondering about tools that might offer standards compliance, access to the underlying code and technologies, and scope for growth?

[Mike Smith]

So you need a video player in your iWeb pages.

If you use Flash and are using a FLash video player, you could follow along Lee Brimelow’s tutorial on this at https://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=23

If you picked out one of the excellent free flv players around rather than built your own, then I’d guess you need to refer to that player’s documentation.

If you’ve embedded a QT player, there may be a way to do this but I can’t point you to it, though this may work : https://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-245987.html

[Mike Smith]

Google’s advice on this is available from https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

Jakob Nielsen’s views are always worth considering. He has some tips on this at :
https://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-keywords.html

And there’s more decent stuff at :

https://www.webdesignerwall.com/general/seo-guide-for-designers/

https://econsultancy.com/blog/5034-a-journalists-guide-to-seo

[Mike Smith]

Have you posted the page anywhere it can be looked at?

[Mike Smith]

It will help you if you can get your design to validate – produce web-standards compliant code. At the moment you have a load of errors. When code is standards compliant, IE8 (and other browsers similarly)use a standards mode, which can give a decent representation of what you intended. When code is not compliant, IE8 uses a “quirks” or”compatibility” mode, where IE’s programmers attempt a best guess at what you meant. Each browser’s quirks handling can be quite different

The w3c validator is free, online, easy to use and helpful, at

https://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.creativeglass.co.za%2F

[Mike Smith]

You could try just deleting the unwanted hours, etc from the two display options – like

<script language="JavaScript1.2">

//Dynamic countup Script- © Dynamic Drive (www.dynamicdrive.com)

//For full source code, 100's more DHTML scripts, and TOS,

//visit https://www.dynamicdrive.com

function setcountup(theyear,themonth,theday){

yr=theyear;mo=themonth;da=theday

}

//////////CONFIGURE THE countup SCRIPT HERE//////////////////

//STEP 1: Configure the date to count up from, in the format year, month, day:

//This date should be less than today

setcountup(2008,3,14)

//STEP 2: Configure text to be attached to count up

var displaymessage="old"

//STEP 3: Configure the below 5 variables to set the width, height, background color, and text style of the countup area

var countupwidth='95%'

var countupheight='20px' //applicable only in NS4

var countupbgcolor='lightyellow'

var opentags='<font face="Verdana"><small>'

var closetags='</small></font>'

//////////DO NOT EDIT PASS THIS LINE//////////////////

var montharray=new Array("Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug","Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec")

var crosscount=''

function start_countup(){

if (document.layers)

document.countupnsmain.visibility="show"

else if (document.all||document.getElementById)

crosscount=document.getElementById&&!document.all?document.getElementById("countupie") : countupie

countup()

}

if (document.all||document.getElementById)

document.write('<span id="countupie" style="width:'+countupwidth+'; background-color:'+countupbgcolor+'"></span>')

window.onload=start_countup

function countup(){

var today=new Date()

var todayy=today.getYear()

if (todayy < 1000)

todayy+=1900

var todaym=today.getMonth()

var todayd=today.getDate()

var todayh=today.getHours()

var todaymin=today.getMinutes()

var todaysec=today.getSeconds()

var todaystring=montharray[todaym]+" "+todayd+", "+todayy+" "+todayh+":"+todaymin+":"+todaysec

paststring=montharray[mo-1]+" "+da+", "+yr+" 10:00"

dd=Date.parse(todaystring)-Date.parse(paststring)

dyear=Math.floor(dd/(60*60*1000*24*365)*1)

dmonth=Math.floor(dd/(60*60*1000*24*12)/(dyear*12))

dhour=Math.floor((dd%(60*60*1000*24))/(60*60*1000)*1)

dmin=Math.floor(((dd%(60*60*1000*24))%(60*60*1000))/(60*1000)*1)

dsec=Math.floor((((dd%(60*60*1000*24))%(60*60*1000))%(60*1000))/1000*1)

if (document.layers){

document.countupnsmain.document.countupnssub.document.write(opentags+dyear+" years, "+dmonth+" months, "+dhour+" +displaymessage+closetags)

document.countupnsmain.document.countupnssub.document.close()

}

else if (document.all||document.getElementById)

crosscount.innerHTML=opentags+dyear+" years, "+dmonth+" months, "+displaymessage+closetags

setTimeout("countup()",1000)

}

</script>

[Mike Smith]

IE 6 uses a different box model if the site is w3c compliant (standards mode) or not (quirks mode).

Your site is probably triggering quirks mode by failing on standards ( https://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dimartinoice.com%2F ) , though fixing this may or may not make the issue go away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bug
https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time/

[Mike Smith]

The first tag is for all robots, and suggests indexing all pages. The googlebot tag is just the same, but is aimed only at Google – you don’t really need it as it’s assumed in the robots metatag and is anyway what the search engine bots would normally do. #

https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=79812

Sometimes people add a whole pile of hidden text for robots, related to the contents of their Flash page, but Google now aims to index your Flash text. If you do want to do this (for non-Google robots) you might want to hide text inside a comments tag like so that the robot can see it but the browser won’t show it.

https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72746

If you want to block robots from some areas, you could try loading a robots.txt file (though not all robots follow the “rules”)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

[Mike Smith]

Hi Nick

Sorry, I haven’t viewed any of the video yet – it doesn’t run at all on my little slow web machine. I might check it out later when I’m back at base.

What format to encode to – some people are strong advocates for one or another format, so I’ll comment with caution!

Many modern systems support H264 fine, so long as the frame size is not too large and the data rate is kept down. Some are convinced that H.264 offers better results for comparable file sizes (than VP6).

VP6 is a Flash-native format, and in the words of the CCOW web master “just works”. Lots of people use it for web video. In my own tests, I found that VP6 produces very similar quality results to H264 at datarates around 400 – 600 kbps and frame size 1/4 standard definition. Flv files from a Flash encoder of course can also contain Flash cue points.

The threads on these link https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/16/856944
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/16/856959
shows some perspectives on this

[Mike Smith]

H.264 files are supported in recent versions of Flash player on both Mac and Windows.

H.264 uses complex encoding, which takes a lot of processing / graphics power to play back.

If you have big frame sizes or a large data rate your video files may make more demands than an older system can handle, resulting in choppy playback or worse – no playback, crashes – on older Windows or Mac machines, though newer and higher-spec machines should be fine (either platform).

In choosing your data rate and frame sizes from compression / distribution you no doubt will take a decision on what trade-off to make between quality and file size, and carry out tests on whatever you set as a minimum playback system you want to support, to determine how big your frame sizes and your files should be.