What I’m trying to say is this: it’s hard to explain stuff. Actually, scratch that. It’s hard to explain stuff to clients, especially when you’re doing it through email. It’s really difficult, because you can’t point at things on the screen, or wave your hands around in the air in elite gesticulation. You can’t modulate your tone of voice, or enunciate things just the way you want to.

Nope. You can’t. Instead, you have to type. And through typing, a lot is lost. Instead of pointing, you have to make up your own nouns for things. Overcomplicated nouns, adjectives, and cluttered sentence structures will then take over. They storm the gate, bringing the battering ram with them. They burn, pillage, and enslave your email, and you realize that no one, not even yourself, will understand what you’re writing. You find yourself saying things like:

“I can’t do the navigation the way you’re suggesting, because of the thing in the middle (the red band) interrupts the header division, and the navigation block button band thing will overlap the main body text, which in turn will cause people running Internet Explorer to spontaneously combust. Unfortunately, the usual work-around isn’t going to be effective, because of conflicting javascript and css syntax. That’s what causes the footer and footercontent margin classes to appear bloated and disjointed, which in turn makes the css :hover psuedo class code that controls the pull-down unordered list of none effect.”

And your clients won’t understand this. No one will understand it—unless they’ve got a Bachelor’s degree in telepathy. To effectively communicate with clients, you almost have to put them through a crash course in web design. You need to explain all the intricacies of all these different aspects of html and css.

So this is why I’m asking you, the reader, to search the web for a college where I (or any client I might acquire) can get a Bachelor’s in telepathy.

Start googling, everyone!

The nice thing about car companies, is that they seem to have an unlimited website budget.

Fortunately, some PHP wizard came up with a fix. Now is that cool, or what?

I should probably be nicer about things like that. In fact, that’s a fine thing to do, and it works (which is most important). However, I usually like to be on the cutting edge.
So now, using my extra-special Brainfuel Ratings System©™, I shall rate the site:
Overall (not an average): 4.60
Design: 5.00
Implementation: 3.00

Now you can stop reading this blog and do something productive.

—Andrew

Anyway, check it out. It’s sure to make your day that much more exciting.

…Or not. But check it out anyway.

Well, BugMeNot has the answer. Type in a web address, and you get a dummy name and password you can use (however, this is not for shopping sites, such as Amazon).

Spiffy, eh?

Oh, and by the way, the mushroom header is getting kinda old (so old that the mushroom might possibly grow mold). I’ll have to change it sometime soon—or better yet, you guys should change it. I’ll have to post the Photoshop document sometime and have everyone come up with a good photo for it.

—Andrew

We the undersigned hereby announce our wishes to Microsoft Corporation that it update both Mac and Windows verison of Internet Explorer. In its present form, Internet Explorer is nearly incapable of displaying CSS (also known as Cascading Style Sheets) and other new web technologies correctly, which results in frustration from web designers.

Our requirements for this update to Internet Explorer are as follows:

1. That Internet Explorer is made to display CSS and other web content to the caliber of FireFox, or Safari (other web browsers which display things correctly).

2. That Internet Explorer is made more secure, as to help prevent viruses from infecting people’s computers.

This is, in reality, simply a humble request for Microsoft to make it’s emminant web browser actually work. By leaving Internet Explorer on the shelf to gather dust, Microsoft is depriving many of the people on the Internet a good overall experience of the World Wide Web.

Web designers shouldn’t have to dumb down their design or creativity on account that most of the people on the internet use a web browser that does not display content correctly. This is frustrating, annoying, and unnaceptable.

Yes, I know I’m hyper-critical about everything, but I must say: I didn’t find anything super-technical on their site—No CSS—in fact, most of what composed the site was mainly images. On the plus side, however, I give their designer credit. He made a website that was dominantly brown look pretty good, and the wide color palette somehow brings everything together. This site makes me hungry.

The site design is pretty decent, too. Nice coding, good layout.

We were going to do a CSS drop-down menu for the new Brainfuel site, but we could never resolve the Win Internet Explorer problem. We got it to work with the php include categories thing, though, so that was cool.

I figured out a cute little trick for designing templates while working on Brainfuel: Experiment on a blog elsewhere on the server, but using the same MySQL database. It worked for me, and was a good simulation of actually editing the real BrainFuel, without actually doing so.

After that, check out the CSS Validator. Free, and very useful.