Brackett Design & Strategic Marketing

I was recently preparing the launch of a new Zen Cart store for a client when encountered a blank page on checkout. There was no error, just a blank page. Baffled, I reloaded the CHECKOUT page and processed another test transaction only to see the blank page appear farther up the checkout process on the CART page.

The admin showed the orders were being processed, so the data was hitting the database. I had no where to go, and was looking at either systematically going through each template file and each database table to see if I could find any evidence of what was causing the errors. Read More

I just completed work on the ground-up revamp for the site BroadcastSolutions.com, a site that I first built in 1995. Desperately in need of an “extreme makeover” I built the new site from the ground-up with my WordPress and Zen Cart Combination.

The required store (catalog in this case) customizations to Zen Cart presented some interesting challenges that greatly enhanced my knowledge base of this powerful Open-Source store management system.

I’ll be writing about article marketing often as it as safe and proven method for acquiring backlinks and building Page Rank (PR). Submitting articles to the major article directories is an excellent way to build traffic to your site. First it does not get any more “White Hat”, which Google just loves. Second, you can get others to market your content for free simply because they are too lazy to create their own. Third, it builds credibility for you as an authority for your product or service.

This all sounds great right? Yes, right up to point of sitting down to write your first article. Then it comes back, the flashback to your Freshmen year in high school during finals when you had to write that Essay on post modern industrialization in the 19th century. You freeze, your finger wont’ work and your mind, normally filled with ideas, is frozen solid. What do you do?  Hire a writer. Read More

The main reason is to accommodate varying screen resolutions and protect your site from going haywire on different monitors. First, IE6 and IE7will not allow users to resize text that has been sized in pixels. Face it, your readers will need to resize text at some point for a whole host of reasons. They could have bad eyesight, or they could be using a super hi-rez laptop monitor, or they might be be giving a presentation.

My transition to EM’s from Pixels has been one of experimenting to learn the methods so I can code in EM’s with the same flow that I use with Pixels. I’m at the point now where it’s easier to code in EM’s because I know what the result will be and I feel more in control of the typography.

EM is taken from the print world. Typographers use it as a unit of measurement for horizontal spacing. It’s a relative unit of measure: 1em is a distance equal to the text size. For example, in a 10px type, an em is 10 pixels, in 16 pixel type it is 16em. Basically 1 em of padding is equal to the text size. Confused? Don’t worry about it. Let’s code.

Read More