Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

I’ve recently been doing a lot of research into typography.

The common misconception about typography is that it is just about choosing a font. Typography actually entails a lot more than that. Typography is as much about the space around the text, and in between the text, as the text itself.

Good typography is invisible. Its sole purpose is to aid reading.

If you are interested in reading more about typography and its proper use, then have a read over these 2 articles:

• “The elements of typographic style applied to the web” by Richard Rutter
• “Five simple steps to better typography” by Mark Boulton

Did you know there is an optimum width for a Measure? Do you even know what a Measure is?

“A Measure is the name given to the width of a body of type. It is defined by the amount of characters that are in the line. A general good rule of thumb is 2-3 alphabets in length, or 52-78 characters (including spaces). This is for legibility purposes.“

How long is the measure on your website? Have you had a thought about its legibility?

If Mr. Rutter or Mr. Boulton have got you inspired about typography, and how it can be used better on your website, then you might want to experiment with some new fonts. Here are a couple of free font sites that are worth checking out:

• Betterfonts.com
• daFont.com

If you can think of any other quality, free font sites worth mentioning then leave a comment below and I’ll make sure to add them to the list above.

The last few days I have spent fixing web browser compatibility issues for both our company website and this blog. Small issues like cell padding that Firefox and IE6 both interpret differently can make your website look completely different in some web browsers! And I’m saying different in a very bad way!

Have you tested to see how your website/blog looks in different web browsers?

Accessibility and usuability are the buzz words being used on the internet lately. If your site is not accessible or usuable because of poorly coded CSS you could be losing potential clients that are trying to visit your site.

On my laptop I have Internet Explorer 7, the latest version of Firefox and Internet Explorer 6 standalone installed. If you didn’t know already standalone versions of some web browsers are avaliable on the internet, just google for example “IE6 Standalone“. This combats the issue of Internet Explorer installing the new updates over the previous version, and allows you to keep the older browser version for browser testing. I’m constantly testing my site in these browsers, tweaking bits of CSS so the site design and structure remains constant for all surfers visiting the site.

To test my site in Safari, the standard web browser most Mac users have, I discovered BrowsrCamp. BrowsrCamp is a great web service that allows the user to enter there website URL, specify a screen resolution and an image quality, then wait a few seconds for an image to be generated of how various web browsers interprets your site.

BrowsrCamp also allows you to test your site in Safari for free, or Camino, Flock, iCab, Mozilla, Netscape, Omniweb, Opera, SeaMonkey and Shiira at a small subscription fee. Did you know there were so many web browsers out there!

After a few hassles yesterday I am happy to see my sites are pretty bulletproof in Safari, Firefox and different versions of Internet Explorer. I haven’t subscribed yet to BrowsrCamp so I am not 100% sure about the other web browsers, although I am quite confident my CSS is coded well enough. This is a great tool for web designers and developers.

If you are visiting my site using any of the other web browsers specified please let me know if there are any issues. Also if you know of any other web broswer testing services please let us know.

I’ve been pretty scarce here lately. But for good reasons.

The last couple weeks I’ve been a busy bee re-designing, re-aligning, and re-branding Gravit8′s website (in case you don’t know, Gravit8 is the company I run). Quite a big ask you might say?

It was, but I’m very happy with the end result. The new Gravit8 website allows website visitors to subscribe to the site, it contains RSS feeds, it’s completely searchable, it has poll and commenting facilities, and it’s design is entirely CSS based. Not only that, it also has a discussion forum, it is database driven, and it has a client log-in facility.

We hope the new features, and the new look of the site, are a better representative of what we can achieve for our clients.

Seeing I value my blog reader’s opinions immensely I ask you to visit the website and leave a comment. Let us know what you think of the new site.

I know there is a problem with the content wrapper in Internet Explorer Version 6, but the site should work perfectly in IE7, Firefox and hopefully Safari.

We can take criticism, as long as it is constructive.

The last few days have been a bit hectic, hence the lack of posts. I’ve been carrying my laptop around London trying to find cheap, non-samoosa smelling, internet cafes to work from.

I’m still waiting for my 300 rand a month, uncapped 8mb broadband connection to be activated at my new home … I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that because now I know I’m not going to get any sympathy from my South African readers! Anyways, moving on …

Even though the posts have been infrequent this month, I have still managed to receive my best monthly web stats to date. Hooray. Hoorah. What can I attribute this achievement to?

There are 2 recent happenings that have helped my web stats.

After posting the photoshop tutorial I created for my blog, I thought I might submit it to a few tutorial search engines. I’ve been registered to probably the largest tutorial search engine, Pixel2life, for some time now, and have submitted a couple tutorials in the past. For our main company site though.

Two weeks after submitting the tutorial I started seeing an increase in web visitors, and in the last couple weeks I have had roughly 1600 visitors from Pixel2life.

My advice for those wanting to increase web traffic to their blog:

If you have acquired certain skills from experience in a certain industry then share those skills with others who are wanting to learn more. Find a search engine site/forum/blog that is recognized in that industry and submit your 2 cents worth. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

The second happening that I can attribute my increase in web hits to is a backlink at the recognized web design site, Design Meltdown. Somehow my site managed to be used as a sample site under the Nature Illustration category of web design styles. Have a look for yourself.

Thanks Design Meltdown.