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If you work in a web design or development firm, then you are probably already very (if not too) familiar with the various idiosyncrancies across the major browsers. Even before you start to apply the stylesheets you can spot noticable differences in the way the browsers render the html. This is because the major browsers come with a default stylesheet they use to render html when nothing else is available. It is a very simple stylesheet, mainly affecting paragraphs, headings, links, and fonts. This is why, without any styling, unvisited links appear blue with an underline, among other things. While using links is a trivial example, small differences in font sizes and paragraph margins can become a headache and can cause you to start adding unnecessary fluff to your well crafted stylesheets. There are some techniques you can utilize to minimize the damage, or what we in the industry refer to as browser normalization.

Nifty Corners Cube is a javascript library written by Alessandro Fulciniti that enables you to easily implement rounded corners on your page. There are many different utilities out there on the web that do basically the same thing, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that does it any easier.

If you have ever attempted to implement rounded corners in your markup and css, you’ll find that your markup quickly becomes riddled with presentational divs, loads of images, and the css seems to be playing the role of a bar bouncer. It’s even worse if the content box you have rounded needs to be fluid in any direction.

We at CentreSource have recently been pushing all of our staff to become CSS masters. We’ve been testing, researching, training, and debugging our HTML and CSS code so that we might be able to serve our clients in the best possible ways. One of the newer members of our team, Bob, will be posting a number of documents in the coming weeks about what he’s found during his studies, but in the meantime, I’d like to pass along a great article by Digital Web Magazine called “Markup As A Craft” which goes into depth about the importance of good HTML code. As we in the office have learned, the key to having a good HTML/CSS conversion is starting with good, clean, HTML markup. Hopefully these 21 tips and guidelines will help you on your own person path towards CSS mastery.

Have you ever been designing a website, and everything seems to fit except for that plain white, black, or other random-solid color background? Well my brother recently passed a great design resource along to me that I only thought best to share with the rest of you: DinPattern.com. This site has about 40 free, ready-to-use backgrounds that will definitely bring a little spice to your webdesigns. Go check it out, and while you’re at it, contact the creator, Evan, and thank him for his great work!

A friend recently recommended: http://www.cerberusweb.com

It is a very popular (and affordable) email management solution for help desks & sales teams. It is a bit complex, so you’ll want to take a moment to review the features and consider ways to synthesize it for your business. It appears that everything is managed through email and you have certain email addresses that customers and prospects use (or that it recognizes).

There is workflow, tagging, team resolution, and an integrated knowledge base. Instead of typing an article into the knowledge base, simply answering a client’s problem would give you the ability to ‘Tag’ and file that email into the Knowledge base.

If you thought that anti-spam protection for your incoming mail would alleviate your e-mail problems forever, think again – another issue that can cause more than a few headaches are DNS BlackLists (DNSBLs), sometimes also called RBLs (Realtime Black List). DNSBLs are not a new idea, but their usage is increasing rapidly. In short, a DNSBL is an innovative use of DNS to provide access to lists of IP addresses (or other info). These lists are created on varying criteria — for example, the IP address was caught sending spam, or it’s owned by a company known for supporting/sending spam. Or perhaps the IP address hosts a mailserver not following the rules, or a web/proxy server that has been compromised in such a way that it could be used to send spam. In this way, common sources of spam can be compiled into these lists and checked by a mailserver before accepting mail. If you show up in the blacklist, your mail is rejected.

As the spam-war has escalated, DNSBLs have become a double-edged sword. They have probably saved SMTP from being utterly inundated with spam to the point that it’s useless. However, blacklists have also been forced to get increasingly aggressive. It’s not uncommon for an organization to find itself blacklisted, even if it didn’t overtly send spam (that it knows of). If your organization becomes the unlucky member of a DNSBL, you’ll find that most (if not all) of your email is rejected by the outside world because you’re now considered a spammer. The worst part is that you may have no idea why you were blacklisted and no idea how to get de-listed!