My 2¢ Worth

s promised, I have written a short tutorial on using browser-specific style sheets in your Web pages. That's this weeks second article.

s the Christmas and New Years holidays draw closer I'm trying to figure out a publishing schedule for the next two weeks or so. Both holidays are on a Thursday this year — our normal publishing day. So I'll probably mail the next two issues on a Tuesday.

'm still thinking about publishing a pdf version of Web Sm@rts as I mentioned last week. I haven't had time to work on it yet. I've been totally swamped what with my normal projects and the hustle and bustle of the holidays.

 have decided that the pdf version will contain absolutely no advertising. Therefore I'll have to charge a small fee for you to download it, to offset my publishing costs. Maybe a quarter each issue.

Feature Article

ARE YOU MARKETING WITH A DEAF EAR?

by: Charlie Cook charliecook.net

Can you imagine having a phone conversation where you couldn't hear what the person at the other end was saying? You would have difficulty getting much done and you certainly couldn't tailor your response to their needs and interests. Yet this is the way many people market their products and services.

Most people make the mistake of thinking that marketing is one-way communication. The tendency is to create marketing materials and push them out to your target market and hope for a response. Marketing monologues, whether in person, in a brochure or on a web site are a sure way to scare prospects and clients away

If you want to grow your business your objective should be to create a dialogue with prospects and help them become clients. Starting your marketing efforts by creating a two-way conversation with prospects can help you target your marketing efforts and open the door to future business.

• Is your marketing communication two-way?
• How often do you ask your prospects to identify their biggest problem, relative to the service or product you offer?
• How often do you survey your target market to find out what they are worried about?
• Can you list their most pressing concerns?
• Do you use this information to regularly improve your marketing strategy and materials?

Large corporations provide annual job performance reviews and conduct annual customer satisfaction surveys. While annual feedback like this may be useful to you and is better than nothing, your goal is to create an ongoing dialogue with your prospects and clients so that you can regularly improve how you market your services.

You won't want to rush back to the office after every client meeting to revise your marketing strategy, but the more often you ask questions to understand client and prospect concerns and then shape your marketing to match, the more new clients you'll attract.Improve your marketing by listening to prospects and clients. Get them talking by asking the right questions and then hear what they have to say. Fortune 500 companies use marketing firms, charging tens of thousands of dollars to conduct customer satisfaction surveys. If you're an independent professional or small business owner, you can do it on your own provided you are a good listener.

Improve your marketing by listening to prospects and clients. Get them talking by asking the right questions and then hear what they have to say. Fortune 500 companies use marketing firms, charging tens of thousands of dollars to conduct customer satisfaction surveys. If you're an independent professional or small business owner, you can do it on your own provided you are a good listener.

Good general questions to ask include:

• What's the biggest obstacle to growing your company?
• What problems are your biggest concerns?
• What are your three most important objectives for the next month?
• What's the decision making process in your organization?

The specific questions you use will depend on the problems you solve for clients. If you install phone systems, you'll want to know what your prospects' biggest concern is about their phone system and its installation. If you're an accountant your questions will be about financial objectives. If you provide conflict management you'll want to find out the most common sources of discord.

The objective is to understand your prospects needs and then you can use this information to position your products and services. Let your target market tell you what they want to see and read. Good times to fine tune your marketing include; before you develop your marketing materials, when you talk with prospects and in your conversations with clients.

List 3-5 questions you could ask a prospect or client to identify their biggest concerns relative to your service or products. List 3-5 questions you could ask a prospect or client to identify their biggest concerns relative to your service or products.

If you want to attract more clients, find ways to ensure your communication is two-way. Frequent surveys, in-person conversations and even watching how your clients use your products are all good ways to get feedback. When your communication is two-way you'll know what prospects and clients are concerned about and you can target your marketing to increase your business.

**************

The author, Charlie Cook, helps independent professionals and small business owners who are struggling to attract more clients and grow their businesses. To get the free marketing guide, '7 Steps to Get More Clients and Grow Your Business' visit www.charliecook.net or write ccook@charliecook.net

Describing tables using the SUMMARY attribute

Remember the ALT attribute in <img> tags? The SUMMARY attribute in <table> tags serve a similar purpose, in that it will provide a description of the table to users of non-visual browsers. Unlike the alt attribute, Explorer 4.x, Communicator 4.x and lower browsers do not use the SUMMARY attribute to display pop-up hints when the mouse is paused over the table

NOTE: You likely won't see a visual change by adding the SUMMARY attribute if you're using a graphical browser. However, HTML authors concerned about their content being accessible in different mediums and by users with disabilities are advised to provide a summary of their tables.

Example
<table summary="Red, green and blue rectangles">

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Second Article

Browser-specific Style Sheets

by: Ed Andrist Paradigm Web Design

Style sheets have finally come into general use on the Web. Webmasters are finding, however, that the two major browsers (Internet Explorer & Netscape) support styles in different ways. Until the standards are finally adhered to, we are forced to include browser-specific style sheets in our Web pages. Here's how it's done.

The Disabled Attribute

Internet Explorer 4 and above supports the non-standard Disabled attribute for the style tag. If a style sheet is disabled all its style rules are ignored.

We can, therefore, direct Explorer to a specific style sheet, by disabling all others. Therefore we will place our Netscape style first on the page, enclosed in a style tag with the disabled property:

<style type="text/css" disabled>
p.example {color:#ff0000;}
</style>

Netscape gets its styling and we will create the Explorer version dynamically.

Explorer 4 introduced the powerful, but seldom used, createStyleSheet() method of the document object. In other words, it creates a style sheet with no rules. Every styleSheet object in Explorer has an addRule() method, enabling us to build the style rules, and populate the empty style sheet, on-the-fly.

For example:
newSS = document.createStyleSheet();
newSS.addRule("p","color:maroon");

Notice that addRule() takes two arguments, the style selector, and style specification. The first argument is what usually exists outside the curly braces ({}), and the style specification is what we normally include inside the braces.

Now let's put it all together. We can combine the style and a script for browser-specific styles. You can add as many rules as you like with the addRule() method.

<style type="text/css" disabled>
table.tborder  {
margin-top: 4px;
position: static;
border: 1px #000000 inset;
}

table.nav  {
margin-left: 10px;
margin-top: -4px;
margin-bottom: 600px;
border: 1px #000000 inset;
background-color: #f0f4f0;
}

td.nav  {
padding-top: 2px;
padding-bottom: 2px;
}
</style>



<script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/JavaScript">
<!--
 if (document.all) {
   newSS = document.createStyleSheet();
   newSS.addRule("table.tborder","margin-top: 4px;");
   newSS.addRule("table.tborder","position: static;");
   newSS.addRule("table.tborder","border: 1px #000000 inset;");
   newSS.addRule("table.nav","margin-left: 10px;");
   newSS.addRule("table.nav","margin-top: 4px;");
   newSS.addRule("table.nav","position: fixed;");
   newSS.addRule("table.nav","border: 1px #000000 inset;");
   newSS.addRule("table.nav","background-color: #f0f4f0;");
   newSS.addRule("td.nav","padding-top: 2px;");
   newSS.addRule("td.nav","padding-bottom: 2px;");
 }
//-->
</script>

So you say, "Well that fine Ed, but I want to use external style sheets." Glad you asked. That's even easier. Let's say your two external style sheets were named IE.css for Internet Explorer and NS.css for Netscape. Simple copy the code below.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">

if (parseInt(navigator.appVersion) > 3){

  if (navigator.appName == "Netscape"){
   document.write("<link rel='stylesheet'
   href='NS.css' type='text/css'>");

  } else {
   document.write("<link rel='stylesheet'
   href='IE.css' type='text/css'>");
  }

} else {
  alert("This site is best viewed with a version 4 browser");
}

<script>

Remember to put the document.write statements on one line. Now you have both browser-specific in-line and external style sheets

**************

Ed Andrist is the owner of Paradigm Web Design where a great web site doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Only an arm. He also publishes this E-zine as well as being involved in several other web sites.

Comments?

If you'd like to comment on any aspect of this publication, send an E-mail to
comments@ paradigmwebdesign.net

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