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Today, PetSmart.com, StateLineTack.com and Petsmart Training all go live with revamped looks and more user friendly experiences. I am very proud of all three of them, the people involved and I have all worked very hard to make these come to life. It was a team effort and we pulled together and made some very significant improvements to the sites.

They are all listed in my showcase now because I am very proud of the results of all of our work. Now we just need to see if all of our hard work pays off. Hopefully, we didn’t just do this all to impress ourselves, but rather to improve our customers’ experiences and make shopping much easier and more enjoyable. Wish us luck!

Visit PetSmart.com >>
Visit StateLineTack.com >>
Visit PetSmart Training >>

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I was testing some things and noticed that when I shifted my fonts up to 13px, I shifted the layout slightly in IE6. Well, how come nobody told me? Probably because I am one of the only people to come here…? Anyway, the problem is fixed and everything is back to normal. Why IE? Why… IE7 handled the shift just fine by the way…

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Again, I am following the 2.0 movement. I know, I know, I am behind the times, but I just added the ability to comment to my posts on here. More and more updates to come.

In addition to adding comments to this site, I am in the process of converting my son’s entire site into a Wordpress site. It currently uses Gallery and Wordpress, a custom built downloads and video gallery as well as a static homepage. With the recent updates to Gallery and Wordpress, I can throw all of my invested hours of custom scripting away and just use the Open Source tools. Yes, this kinda breaks my heart too, but I think it will be really cool when it is all done.

So why would I throw away custom code for prebuilt stuff? Well, simple, they keep themselves up to date, they have been in development for many years and the people making them are phenominal. So all in all, I will still get to play around and customize the prebuilt applications, while keeping my son’s site current with the times and super easy to maintain.

It’s not just me doing this. You just watch, this is where the web is heading. With all of these little startups and basement web sites, everything is being developed and then being bought out by big dogs. And the big dogs are taking them even further. The entire web will be moving to this practice of using third party applications. Outsourcing? Yes. But for good reason. Let the developers develop, the designers design and the content developers develop content. In the long run, it will cut development time and costs and make the web easier to keep up to date and maintained.

Now with my son’s site, it is the same thing… remember: keep it simple stupid. That doesn’t just apply to the users’ experience anymore, now it applies to the web site owners’ experience too, or at least it will very very soon.

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If you are a web geek like me, you will enjoy these links. They are a short list of links I have compiled that I find extemely useful and inspiring. If you are serious about web design, I suggest you bookmark these links like I did. Enjoy!

CSS Beauty
9 Rules
A List Apart
Design Snack
Digital Web Magazine
Treehouse Magazine
Web Creme
CSS Zen Garden

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