I am always hammering away at our creative studio, telling them they have to use web compatabile fonts in their web designs. The implications on accessibility and SEO have always been just to big to ignore. On a recent article in Smashing Magazine I came across the term sIFR.

sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, is a standards-compliant way to deliver rich typographical text in a flexible manner to over 90% of web users. Not having had chance to fully read up on it yet, I cannot say if this is going to be a sucess or not, but I am keen to find out and would be fantastic if we no longer have to prevent some of creative elements having to be dulled down, due to a restriction on fonts.

For more in depth reading on SIFR - check it out here http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/ 

Browsing the internet recently, I came across some interesting thoughts on quality control for websites. I particularly liked these 5 fundamental base questions to kick start any test process.

• Why did I make this site? What is the site's purpose?
• What are the business goals, if any, behind this site?
• What has to work for this site to be effective? What has to work for this to even function as a web site?
• Who is the audience for this site? Can they use this site?
• What is core functionality offered by this site? Can all users at least access this core functionality?

If you fancy reading more: http://www.philosophe.com/qc/qc.html  

Came across this nice little site whilst doing some research for one of my clients the other day.

http://www.wordle.net/create

Lets you create Wordclouds from your own content. Check out the one I created for Creative Jar.

Using web analytic data is becoming an essential part of a media agencies role. Although aesthetic considerations have to be a large priorty the project team should also remain focused on their data. Data that is used to its full advantage can often leade to vast improvements in the end users overall experience.

Imedia connection have recently published an interesting article on this very subject: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/20964.asp

The four key questions you can answer using your data are:

1. How do your visitors arrive?
2. What are visitors looking for?
3. Where are visitors landing, bouncing and viewing?
4. What are your website's trends over time?

Get these right and you're onto a winner.

Came across an interesting bug on one of my client's sites the other day. She was having problems with a link being pushed off her screen. So following the basic diagnosing a problem rules, I found out she was using Firefox. Checked that it was fine no problems. So naturally asked her to provide a screen shot. Snap shot below.

As you can see this was most strange as her browser had added in all this additional formatting around the phone number, causing the email link to be pushed out. Naturally this intrigued me to find out what was causing it, so after looking on several forums found out that it was a Skype Plug-in on Firefox. So basically when you browse a website and see a phone number on the site, the Skype extension automatically converts it into a button that you click to call the person using Skype. Although quite handy for some, very annoying for others, and looks like Skype secretly install it without you knowing.