Posts by Alamoxie Web Design
How to Stop YouTube Videos From Hiding Behind Drop-Down Menus
The Problem: Iframes Don’t Like Z-Index I have since found an easier way to prevent IFrames from overlapping other content. Have you ever had this problem? Some element on your page—usually a drop-down menu, that covers areas when you hover over it that it normally would not—ends up appearing behind some other element stead of in front of it. Usually it is an iframe that pretentiously shoves its way in front of everything. Most commonly—at least in my case—this is because I am trying to embed a YouTube video. Ordinarily you would just use the z-index CSS property to move one element in front of another. However, iframes and object...
Read MoreWhat Equipment Do I Need for Online Video?
When you think of video, you may find yourself thinking of massive cameras that cost more than a new car and weight almost as much as you do, big boom mikes swung overhead in a brightly lit studio. With every year that passes, however, video solutions are getting smaller and more affordable. The typical small business uses digital video recorders smaller than the hand of the person holding it. Video Basics Resolution Find out how many megapixels your device has. This may be specified as “3 MP” or “8 Megapixels,” for example. More is better and results in a higher-quality picture. This is constantly improving, so just use this to compare devices...
Read MoreEn-dash and Em-dash
Are you sick of using hyphens ( – ) and double dashes ( -- ) when trying to use a long dash? There are three types of dashes. You might wonder what the difference is between a hyphen, en dash and em dash. The hyphen, or minus sign, is used to show a word is hyphenated. The en dash ( – ) is so called because it is as wide as an uppercase N in whatever the current font happens to be. There are complicated rules on how to properly use the en dash, but in practice it’s rarely used. When it is used, it is most commonly used to indicate a range, such as “March–April.” You may have seen this dash because whenever you use a double...
Read MoreWhy Google Apps is Your Best Email Choice
Google Apps is a powerful suite of online applications. See the Google Apps Wikipedia article for great information on Google Apps. If you have a Gmail account, you may already be familiar with many of these tools, such as Google Calendar and Google Docs. Google Apps is simply hosting these on your own domain for a business or organization and allowing you to manage organization-wide settings and user accounts. This way, for example, you could have email addresses like “firstname@mycompany.com” and nobody would even know it was powered by Gmail. You can create forms that are only...
Read MoreIntroduction to SEO
Search Engine Optimization Strongly recommended reading: Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, quite simply, figuring out how to get your website to be at the top of the list when people Google for your business. When people search for something, they almost always look at only the first ten results (the first page); in fact, usually they only look at the first few results, so going from #11 to #10 or #10 to #7 or #7 to #3 can result in a huge difference in website traffic. Yes, there are a multitude of other search engines, but Google is by far the most important. Most search engines get their results from...
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