The post Roboform appeared first on Aartek Systems.

Let me begin by saying this book is one of the most important, if not THE most important, web design and development books in my personal library. It is a reference for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) styles, but it is so much more. I read the book from cover to cover twice, and both times found it to be both an easy read and incredibly informative.

It opens with a chapter on how and why CSS evolved, and then Chapter Two goes into the basic rules for writing CSS code. The difference between block-level elements and inline-elements is clearly explained, as is when it is appropriate to use classes versus IDs and vice versa.

The rest of the book covers how the cascade works and defines terms such as specificity and inheritance. Chapter Five discusses the various options for using fonts, font weights, font families, styles, and variants. Chapter Seven explains the box model (a problem for many beginning web developers since different browsers sometimes apply the rules differently), while Chapter Eight goes into more detail, covering the differences between margins, padding, borders, etc.

All in all, it is a wonderful book that should be required reading for anyone who is interested in learning how to construct and style web pages properly.

The post CSS: The Definitive Guide appeared first on Aartek Systems.

• Web development – many beginners use the terms “web design” and “web development” interchangeably. In fact, building a web site from scratch is a lot like building a house from scratch. Many subcontractors are needed to build the house, from plumbers to electricians to carpenters. Likewise, the construction of a web site, particularly a complex site, often requires many different specialists in a variety of programming or coding fields. The term “web development” is an all-encompassing term similar to “real estate development.” It includes every aspect of the web site construction process, from design through completion.
• Web design – this phrase refers specifically to the design aspect of building a web site. Again, using the home construction analogy, a “web designer” is technically like the architect of a building. He or she decides what the site will look like and how the various pieces, such as navigation bars, will function together. The designer may or may not be involved in actually writing the code that puts flesh on the design skeleton.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – this is a part of the development process that few web designers are truly familiar with. It involves writing the code and content of the site in such a way as to make it more “authoritative” on a particular topic in the eyes of the various search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Search engine marketing – getting a site to rank well in the search engines is not accomplished solely by optimization. Other factors, such as link popularity, come into play. The phrase “search engine marketing” encompasses all of these and includes search engine optimization.
• HTML – the fundamental language of web pages. All novices MUST learn HTML if they are to ever be truly proficient at ANY of the web development specialties.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – like HTML, this is a fundamental language of web pages. The difference is that HTML is focused primarily on organizing your content, while the primary purpose of CSS is to make your content visually appealing.

Any prospective student of web design or development should begin by learning the disciplines listed above, then proceed to more advanced specialties as needed.

The post Getting Started in Web Design and Development appeared first on Aartek Systems.

My wife and I eat at La Fogata at least once a week, and view it as our “treat” night. The atmosphere is more casual than some high end restaurants and as a result is more relaxed and laid back. The staff is always friendly and courteous, and the service is almost always extremely fast. You are hardly seated before chips arrive and your drink order is taken. Once your order is taken, the food usually arrives hot within ten minutes or less. Even during busy times, you can be in and out within thirty minutes if you wish.

In our opinion, it is hands down the best Mexican restaurant in the Greenville area.

The post La Fogata Mexican Restaurant in Mauldin, South Carolina appeared first on Aartek Systems.

The store is located in front of Bi-Lo and across the street from Ingles.

The post The UPS Store in Mauldin, SC appeared first on Aartek Systems.

1. Your site is confusing. Eye-catching is one thing, but is it clear to a visitor where important information about your business is located? I frequently come across sites which fail to provide easy navigation schemes, thereby hindering my quest to find the information I’m looking for. Make sure your site makes sense and that everything is easy to find and follow.
2. You still have a site that plays background music. Newsflash: this was cool, oh, about fifteen years ago, back in the days when everything about the ‘net was new and exciting. In this day and age, with sites like Youtube, ESPN, etc. sound is no big deal. Visitors want sound when they want it; they don’t want it shoved in their faces when they visit your site.
3. Your text is illegible. I’m frequently amazed at the sites that feature text that is too small, light against a light background, or dark against a dark background. What are these people thinking? Sometimes, in our quest to get “design cute”, we can go overboard. Make sure visitors can read your text.
4. Your site opens with a flash intro. See item #2, above. Like background music, flash doesn’t “wow” anyone anymore; I personally find it to be more of a nuisance to get through than anything. As a matter of fact, it can hurt your search engine rankings. Lose it.

Allways remember: an ugly, but well-structured, easy-to-read website with few hindrances is better than a beautiful, flash-heavy, hard-to-navigate site. Fortunately you can have the best of both worlds. And after all, aren’t sales/conversions really what you’re after?

The post Does your website need an overhaul? appeared first on Aartek Systems.

Aaron Computers has been in the IT service business since 1993 and has established a loyal following in Anderson County. After 15 years of excellence, they have decided to expand into the Greenville, Mauldin, and Simpsonville market. We welcome the move and look forward to working together.

The post New IT Support Partnership appeared first on Aartek Systems.

Considering the relatively low cost involved (web sites are available for as little as $400 plus $20 a month for hosting), any business that is serious about competing in the Greenville or Upstate area (or the modern economy in general) absolutely has to have a web site.

The post Is Your Business Represented on the Web? appeared first on Aartek Systems.

My problem arose when I realized that one, and only one, song from a particular LP was invisible when I looked at the album I had copied over. I was using the phone’s built-in VCast music library and player to get to the album. I decided to access the phone as a USB mass storage device instead, so that I could see if the actual song file had been copied. In fact, it was there, pretty as you please. I tried copying it again anyway, but still had no luck viewing the file from the music library.

Then, on a hunch, I decided to carefully compare the file to other song files from the same album, to see if there was any reason this one wouldn’t show up in the library. It was then that I noticed that one word in the song’s title had an apostrophe. Since I had allowed Spin it Again to assign file names, it had not occurred to me that the software would use the exact title (including the apostrophe) as the name of the file. I changed the name of the file, replacing the apostrophe with an underscore, and voila! VCast could now see the song. When using third party software to rip songs or modify file names in any way, be sure to eliminate any stray apostrophes, commas, etc. or your MP3 player’s music player may not be able to read the file.

An another occasion, two different songs from one album did not show up in the Vcast player. Both copied fine, and there were no special characters, etc. I was stimied, until I realized that the two songs had the longest two titles on the album – one with 52 characters and the other with 45 characters. Since the file name consisted of the song title in each case, I decided to reduce the file names to about 25 each. Once again, both songs magically appeared. Apparently, Verizon’s software can’t read file names over a set length, so be sure to keep all filenames to a reasonable number of characters.

The post Getting Verizon VCast to See All Songs on a LG VX8350 appeared first on Aartek Systems.

I regularly use my laptop at our local library. Actually, I occasionally teach seminars at the local library, and between classes I like to catch up on email correspondence. Receiving email was, as usual, no problem. Sending email, however, was a major pain. In yet another ongoing crusade to control spam, the library’s firewall prevented email of any kind to be sent via port 25.

For a while, I used webmail to send mail, but this was extremely inconvenient since I have, due to the nature of my business, about ten different email accounts that I send/receive email through. Checking each one of them individually through webmail was time consuming and laborious. Furthermore, most days I would open up Outlook Express (my mail client of choice) without thinking and download my mail. To reply, I then had to log into webmail and copy and paste the original message into the reply.

So I tried other options, including creating an SSH tunnel via Putty (I couldn’t get it to work, even with expert advice). Seems my mail server isn’t configured properly to allow this kind of traffic.

Anyway, after months of workarounds and dealing with the nuisance, I suddenly remembered seeing “IMAP” when adding an email account in Outlook Express. Then it dawned on me…I have a Google mail (gmail) account (which can be configured as IMAP), so why can’t I set up my gmail server to send mail and thereby possibly bypass the firewall restrictions?

As it turned out, I could. First, I had to enable IMAP in Gmail. The steps are as follows:

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
4. Select Enable IMAP
5. Click Save Changes

Next, I need to configure Outlook Express. I could have followed Google’s instructions on how to do this; however, I didn’t want to receive mail via IMAP, but just send  it. In order to do this, for each account I needed to send email from, I changed the outgoing server to imap.gmail.com. To do this:

1. Click Tools, Accounts
2. Select the account to change and choose Properties
3. Click the Servers tab.
4. Enter imap.gmail.com for the outgoing mail server.
5. At the bottom, check the box that says “My Server Requires Authentication”.
6. Click the “Settings” button.
7. Choose the “Log On Using” radio button.
8. Enter my gmail account name and password and click OK.
9. Click the Advanced tab.
10. Change the outgoing mail server to 465.
11. Check the “This server requires a secure connection” box.

With that, I was able to send email using Outlook Express, from behind the firewall.

The post Using Outlook/Outlook Express to Send Mail Through a Firewall appeared first on Aartek Systems.