Typekit is a font delivery and licensing service which enables web designers to use a much wider range of fonts in website than had previously been available. It is a commercial service which web site owners and web designers can subscribe to if they need to use specialist fonts in their HTML content.

Until recently, the HTML design process has been limited to a small range of common fonts that could be guaranteed to be found on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. (more…)

If you want to take credit card and other forms of payment online and you do not have a merchant account, you can use a third-party payment processor.

These companies let you use their process payments via their merchant account and then transfer the money to your own bank account.

The advantage of this is that there is usually with very little setup required in terms of providing paper work and business documentation.

The downside is that it adds another layer of processing to your payments and therefore the commission charged for each payment is sometimes higher.

The best known third-party payment processor is PayPal.

A thumbnail is a reduced version of an image which can be clicked on to show a larger version of the image.

This is commonly seen in online shopping web sites where a small photograph of a product is dsplayed on the prodcuct information page and the visitor has the option to inspect a larger, more detailed picture by clicking on the thumbnail. It is also common to see online picutre galleries laid out as rows of thumbnail photographs, each of which can be clicked to reveal the full size photograph.

This is the process of purchasing domain names that are similar to those of popular web sites, but contain a typographical error.

A common example is when people type MICROSIFT instead of MICROSOFT.

These alternative web sites are usually set up to generate revenue from advertising.

When purchasing a domain name it is sometimes worth considering whether or not to purchase mis-spelt versions of your own domain name.

A table is an HTML element that should be used to present tabular data. During the early years of web site development, tables were used (incorrectly) to form layout grids for web sites.

This arose partly because web design was a new profession, partly because inconsistencies in web browsers meant that is was difficult to achieve complex layouts without them and partly because software used to create web pages used table in their off the shelf templates.

Table based layout is easy for beginner to learn, but leads to web sites which are neither search engine friendly or easy to maintain.

By avoiding the use of tables for layout, a web designer created pages which are more flexible, easier to maintain and load faster. All modern websites and site redesigns should not rely on tables for their layout.

An example correct usage of a table is shown below.

In this instance, the table is only used to present a grid of information like a spreadsheet.