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Welcome to Max Design

Max Design is a Sydney web design and web development business that specialises in fresh, dynamic sites with a strong focus on Cascading Style Sheets, usability, accessibility and web standards. We also offer customised CSS and Web Standards training. Contact us for more information.

Recent news

Two articles - now in italian

November 19th, 2008

Thanks to Luca Magnani Styling the <hr> element has now been translated into Italian and Ideal line length for content has now been translated into Italian.

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Some links for light reading (18/11/08)

November 18th, 2008

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Webstock interview

November 12th, 2008

Mike Brown from Webstock asks me some hard questions including:

  • You’ve been quoted as saying that “sleep is for pussies”. Tell us about a typical working day for you - what you do, what hours you work, how much sleep you get.
  • You do a lot of teaching and training with HTML and CSS. Have things improved? Do web people in general have a better understanding of how to use HTML and CSS than they might of a few years ago?
  • What’s the future for HTML? Will it always be with us? Be supplanted by something else? And what’s your impression of the progress towards HTML5?
  • What are you looking forward to in CSS3?
  • Which speaker are you most excited about seeing at Webstock 09?

Read the interview, if bored

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Some links for light reading (11/11/08)

November 11th, 2008

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Three new translations

November 10th, 2008

Aligning inline images with the vertical-align property has now been translated into Russian by Nickolas Loiko. Translation: выравнивание inline изображений с помощью css свойства vertical-align

Web standards checklist has now been translated into Russian by Nickolas Loiko. Translation: checklist web-стандартов

Web standards checklist has now been translated into Swedish by Lillan Backa. Translation: Web standards checklist - checklista för webbstandarder

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Pushing the boundaries on content-rich websites

November 8th, 2008

On the 6 November 2008 the inaugural Edge of the Web event was held in Perth.

The conference was organised by Australian Web Industry Association and Red Horizon Events, and boasted a great speaker list!

Here are the slides from my talk on “Pushing the boundaries on content-rich websites”.


The Australian Museum recently implemented a number of open-communication devices such as commenting, tags, user-generated content to their website. Integrating these devices on large, existing websites is not easy task. The diversity of audience, as well as indexing large amounts of existing data presents a number of challenges, however with more customers expecting an open information ecosystem more large sites are adding these tools. This presentation looks at some of the trials and tribulations that arose during the integration - information that can help other organisations embarking on a similar projects.

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Some info on URL canonicalization

November 7th, 2008

I have seen the negative effects of URL Canonicalization in action. Have you?

“Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.”

SEO advice: url canonicalization

“In computer science, canonicalization (abbreviated c14n, where 14 represents the number of letters between the C and the N) is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation.”

wikipedia - Canonicalization

“In information technology, canonicalization (pronounced KA-nahn-nihk-uhl-ih-ZAY-shun and sometimes spelled canonicalisation) is the process of making something canonical — that is, in conformance with some specification.”

What is canonicalization

“If the search engines sees a page as being published at many separate URLs, the search engine may rank your pages lower than they would otherwise, or not rank them at all. Canonicalization issues can split link juice between pages if people link to variants of the URL.

URL Canonicalization: The Missing Manual

“The practice of consolidating all versions of a page under one URL is referred to as “canonicalization” (because you collapse all versions under the “canonical” or true version). By adhering to several best practices, you should be able to address 90% of common site-wide canonicalization issues on your site and consequently increase how your site ranks.”

Domain Canonicalization

“Your website can be accessed with www.domain.com and domain.com. Since Google penalizes this due to duplicated content reasons, you have to stick your domain to either www.domain.com or domain.com. But - since some links are outside of your website scope and the search engines already have indexed your website under both addresses, you can’t change that easily.”

.htaccess Redirect/Rewrite Tutorial

Posted in web, seo, 3 Comments

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 is a Proposed Recommendation

November 5th, 2008

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 as a Proposed Recommendation, and published updated Working Drafts of Understanding WCAG 2.0, Techniques for WCAG 2.0, and How to Meet WCAG 2.0. WCAG defines how to make Web sites, Web applications, and other Web content accessible to people with disabilities. Comments are welcome through 2 December 2008. Read the announcement, Overview of WCAG 2.0 Documents, and about the Web Accessibility Initiative. (Permalink)

Further reading

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Some links for light reading (4/11/08)

November 4th, 2008

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Some links for light reading (28/10/08)

October 28th, 2008

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