How do I display fonts that can be re-sized by viewers?

The best way to allow your site visitors to be able to zoom in on the fonts on your page is to use percentage [%] for the size; rather than using pixels [px].

How do I know what the percentage is for the font pixel size I normally use? Here is a quick lookup chart that should help you figure out what value to use when setting your font size percentages: (based on YUI ver 2.7 font sizing guidelines)

PX  —  %
10  —  77
11  —  85
12  —  93
13  —  100
14  —  108
15  —  116
16  —  123.1
17  —  131
18  —  138.5
19  —  146.5
20  —  153.9
21  —  161.6
22  —  167
23  —  174
24  —  182
25  —  189
26  —  197

As an additional note, IE has its own little quirks that are not found in fully compliant browsers. So, for IE 5.5 and IE 6 you would want to use the * [star filter] hack in order for the fonts to be viewed at the same size in those browsers:
(e.g. * html p {font-size: 77%; } )
Likewise, for IE 7 you would use something similar
(e.g. *:first-child+html p { font-size: 77%; } )

To add to the above note, do not use the quirks mode. Use the “Standards/Strict” rendering mode, displayed below:

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

Don’t forget to omit the extra blank spaces in the doctype declaration above.

What are the best SEM choices for my business?

Paid Search or Organic Search? Where should I start?

Capitalizing on internet marketing for growth or sustainability of your company? You have a few options. You can try to figure out on your own what is the most effective, cost-efficient and quickest solution. You can hire an SEO/SEM company. Or you can say that internet marketing is simply a fad that will fade out soon; and hope to weather the storm and wait it out. What is the best solution short-term and long-term?

Considering the short-term analysis, waiting it out could be fatal to your business. Trying to figure it out on your own is not a quick solution, nor is it probably going to be an effective and cost-efficient solution. This leaves you with the option of hiring an SEO/SEM professional. However, hiring an SEO/SEM company can be nearly as scary as going to the car lot to buy a used car. Long on promises and short on delivery can leave you with a dwindling bank account and no new customers to show for it.

Analyzing the approach for sustainability and growth over the long term inherently includes a short-term plan that is also consistent with you long-term goals. A number of other factors, including social media marketing, mobile marketing and the best blend of advertising methods to incorporate will all need to be considered when developing this plan.

What is the first thing you can do to minimize your costs? To start with ask some questions. Find out how the SEO/SEM company is going to help you get conversions and deliver ROI. Find out where they suggest you should spend your marketing dollars. You may want to follow that up with a question as to what they base that marketing decision on.

This is part one of a series on SEM choices. Click Here for Part Two. Use the subscribe button at the top left of this page, to make sure you receive the other parts to this series.

I was editing a theme and then my Wordpress pages went blank. The WP-Admin page is only a blank page. I can’t access the Worpress backend. I can’t login to my Wordpress site. Did I corrupt my theme? Did I delete my Wordpress site? How do I get my Wordpress site back? Did I screw up my Wordpress database? This has happened before to someone else, right?

Well, it has happened to someone else. It is a bit scary at first … but, don’t worry. It is fairly easy to get your pages back. You don’t even have to mess with phpMyAdmin or mySQL. Here is what you do.

If you are using Dreamweaver, or other similar IDE, you can open your site and look at the files on your remote server. If you have access to your remote server from a web control panel, or otherwise, the same solution will work. Locate the theme that you were working on when the pages went blank and you lost access to the Wordpress backend and login page. If you don’t have a copy of the remote files on your local machine, you may want to download the theme files as a backup. Most likely you already have the copy you uploaded to your site. Then, you can try deleting the functions.php page for the theme. That could very well give you back your Wordpress site. It won’t fix the theme you were using, but you can switch to a different theme while you figure out what is wrong. If deleting the functions.php file does not do the trick, then simply delete the entire theme from your remote server. You can find the theme in wp-content->themes->theme-that-caused-the-problem.

I stumbled upon this problem myself when I was trying to create a theme that obviously had a problem in my code somewhere. Removing the functions.php file was all that was necessary for me to be able to access my WP backend and change the theme; as an interim fix, while I attempted to locate the problem in my code.

I hope this helps someone else save some time and worry.

If you found this helpful, let me know.