St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

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CSS is a technology frequently used in modern web site design. It’s an acronym which stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Sheets because it’s documents that hold instructions, like a sheet of paper. It’s Style because it holds instructions on the visual appearance of just about everything in a web site, except the browser itself. It’s Cascading because it’s scope is nested – which means, well we’ll get to that later.

there are two main advantages of using CSS:

1. Because it gives you far more control over the appearance of a web pages elements than HTML.
2. Because you can set a “style” and use it on through out the site, just by mentioning it’s name. This means if you want to change the font color for every piece of text that has a style named “RegText” (we use “classes” to name styles), attached to it, you can just change the parameters in the style sheet and every where in the web site(s) that use that style sheet will be automaticlly updated. Sure beats going onto every page and changing every element that needs it.

Just a heads up to all the other Florida locals out there. Red Tide is back. We all quessed the rains washing out all that fertilizer out to the Gulf and such would cause a red tide blom all over Florida and now, sadly, we were right. The Red Tide Algae has been growing since our rains started in ernest. Fed by the over abundance of nutrients, they are now starting to bloom. Here’s a map of the current (a week late) Weekly Red Tide Count Report from the state.

High levels of red tide found in southwest Florida

Tampa Bay’s 10 Fri, 07 Jul 2006 7:15 AM PDT

NAPLES, Fla. (AP); A red tide bloom in waters off the southwest Florida coast is spreading and getting worse. Test results show high levels of red tide have been found off northern Collier County

or :

High levels of red tide found in southwest Florida
The Daily Comet Fri, 07 Jul 2006 7:21 AM PDT
A red tide bloom in waters off the southwest Florida coast is spreading and getting worse. High levels of red tide have been found off northern Collier County, test results showed Thursday . . .

Hi – Texx Smith (James) here. Not many personal notes about my life make it into my blog. But with so much happening right now it’s a great time to let everyone know about all the activity.

My wedding is tomorrow. We’ve been planning the wedding in earnest for about a year now. It’s to be held, right before sunset, at the very beach were My Shannon and I met three years ago to the day.

After a short honeymoon I’ll be going through all the resume’s and hopefully hiring two new sales reps. If you are one of those candidates, thanks for applying! If you haven’t applied yet and you need a sales job in the St. Petersburg Market or the the Venice Florida market, please let me know you’re interested.

My latest sub-contract for web design with Verizon’s superpages.com has ended! The other Web Designers there are great people. I kninda feel sorry for them and they’re clients. They have a lot of rules (some of them just ridiculous) to work within, a heck of a large quota, a sales quota, and a phone center to maintain while trying to make web sites. Sometimes these designers really put out some good stuff. But with so many clients on each designers plate at the same time . . .
Overall I have to say I’m glad I’m done with Verizon and I don’t think I’ll be signing any more contracts with them. I don’t like it when most of my clinets feel they were taken advantage of. I also don’t like the constraints they put on me artisticlly and technologiclly. Tehy’re product isn’t very good and I’d rather do some high quality stuff.
They also don’t work with search engines at all. They say they do, but when clients ask about it they are pitched over-priced pay per click adverting on superpages.com or highly marked up and slow to respond, second party google ad-words accounts.

But more on that later . . .

My Mother’s health has taken a turn for the worse, but not as bad as it could be. If you are a family member and you would like the latest info, then please drop me a line.

There’s also lots of My Shannon’s family and freinds in town and some of mine as well. To find someone from my side of the family call me, to find out info about Shannon’s side call her or just go visit everyone out on the beach at “the cottages”

More after the wedding . . . Wish me luck!

This one is straight form the “I’m glad I didn’t do that” files. Seems the BBC was about to do a live interview with editor of some tech web site about the Apple/Beatles verdict that came down recently. Well they grabbed their “expert” from the lobby and put him on the air.
Only problem was that he wasn’t the expert! He was a taxi-driver there to pick some one up. And here’s the funny part – he went ahead and answered their questions – and did fairly well!
Here’s the full story

I have recently taken a 6 month contract to work as a web developer for Verizon. I’ll be working with the Southeast united states superpages division. I’m not sure how much company policy will let me say about what I do, but I will say that they charge waaaay to much for the web design products and services they sell. Here’s the first web site I’ve completed for them.

All exsisting Dream Designs by Texx Smith and/or St Petersburg Web Design clients will still have all contracts fufilled, service will be exactly as before. All exsisting bids will still honored. And if you are thinking of becoming a client, please do there is still plenty of time in my schedule for a few more clients.

On a more personal note. I’m not sure how well I’m fitting in there. The people are nice but I have some reservations about the quality of the products and services I’m providing. They are quite corporate and controlling, the background check is a nightmare and they have a stringent dress code. The biggest bummer so far is the facty that they only want to give me 1/2 dau off for my weeding! We’ve been planning this for over a year. And now I have to leave at noon get down to Venice, get mt tux, get dressed, get married and rush back home so I can get to sleep early and get back to work early the next dat so I can make up for the half day I took off.

They pay fairly well and have benefits however. With my own business only pulling in one or two new clients a month, I have to have some steadier income coming in. With this job, or any full time job that doesn’t go much over 40 hours, I can still provide excellent service and products to new and exsisting clients of my own business.

So much to learn! What do you think of the Florida Web Design Market? Click here to leave your thoughts – no registration required!