Here is a quick summary for those of you who don’t want to read the whole article:

1. Always use strict doctype and standards-compliant HTML/CSS
2. Always use a reset at the start of your css
3. Use -moz-opacity:0.99 on text elements to clean up rendering in Firefox, and text-shadow: #000 0 0 0 in Safari
4. Never resize images in the CSS or HTML
5. Check font rendering in every browser. Don’t use Lucida
6. Size text as a % in the body, and as em’s throughout
7. All layout divs that are floated should include display:inline and overflow:hidden
8. Containers should have overflow:auto and trigger hasLayout via a width or height
9. Don’t use any fancy CSS3 selectors
10. Don’t use transparent PNG’s unless you have loaded the alpha

But you should go ahead and read the whole article (via WebAppers.com).

The irony of creativity is this: people want to be creative without change. They want innovation with no risk. They want a new result with the same exact behavior. They can talk for hours about how passionate they are about creativity, but when it comes to actually changing anything, they’ll find a way to repeat the same thing again and again. That’s why books, seminars, courses and lectures on creativity rarely translate into much actual creation. No one can make change happen except the person who must accept the fears, and consequences, of change.

3. No clients. This is a big one. 37signals is not a client services company. Rather, they build products. 37signals is a small team of people who all understand the web and web development very, very well. It’s easy for them to visualize things and move on — but it’s not so easy for many of our clients. A big reason we do visual comps at Blue Flavor is to facilitate communication and sign-off with our clients.

This is exactly what we thought when we first read the 37signals blog post. They can afford to skip comps because they don’t have clients, they have customers. It’s a subtle difference but an important one.

Currently we’re working on our first ZenCart installation for a (the) local leather store, a shopping cart system for their wholesale business. Once complete we will proceed with setting up another ZenCart installation for their retail business. ZenCart is quite feature-rich and it’s been a bit of a learning curve but we’re currently loading products and should be launching soon.

In the meantime, over on the newly minted NETTUTS web site they’ve posted a nice roundup of the best of the web for April. There were some great web design and development resources posted on blogs last month, and NETTUTS is shaping up to be a “keeper” for the RSS reader.

“Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design helps us to understand a product. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest. Good design is durable. Good design is consequent to the last detail. Good design is concerned with the environment. Good design is as little design as possible.” Dieter Rams

• Keep it simple.
• Stick with what works.
• Put the real before the ideal.
• Have a process but be flexible.
• When all else fails, just work.

We try to manage our projects just enough to get the job done. Anything else wastes your time and money. We do have a process, but we aren’t slaves to it. He closes with…

It’s far too easy to put a process in place that hinders more than it helps. If you find you’re working harder on the management of your projects than you are on the projects themselves, it’s probably a good idea to scale back, re-set expectations and focus on what’s important.

Highslide JS is an open source JavaScript software, offering a Web 2.0 approach to popup windows. It streamlines the use of thumbnail images and HTML popups on web pages. The library offers these features and advantages:

• No plugins like Flash or Java required.
• Popup blockers are no problem. The content expands within the active browser window.
• Single click. After opening the image or HTML popup, the user can scroll further down or leave the page without closing it.
• Compatibility and safe fallback. If the user has disabled JavaScript or the JavaScript fails in any way, the browser redirects directly to the image itself or to a fallback HTML page. This fallback is able to cope with most exceptions and incompatibilities.

It sounds too good to be true but the proof is in the pudding: it’s very refined and smooth. Unfortunately it will probably be abused by some site designers. Nonetheless, I need to go find a place to use it.