You may find you need to put a link over a image and there's no simple way to slice it. But putting an image map over it, as I found out the hard way, will not work for all email clients. I attempted to place image maps over an image of several rings piled atop each other. Each ring needed to be linked individually and slicing the image up for a table would have been a pain. I tested in entourage and outlook '03 with no problems. The email was sent out and sure enough, there were problems. Outlook '07, gmail, and others were acting very buggy. Either the image maps weren't linking, they were causing unwanted gaps, or other bugs.

Basically, image maps don't work. They may work fine in a few email clients, but if you want across the board functionality, they won't work. Another reason to avoid image maps are they don't offer very good accessibility, no alt text. If you need to use an image as a link, you'll need to figure out a clever way to slice the image and place it in properly made table.

I recently got an invite to try out the new web browser - Rockmelt. It was created by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and built on google's chromium browser. Rockmelt has a serious focus on social networking, specifically Facebook. Before you can do anything, you log into the browser via your Facebook account, and you then are constantly connected.

Rockmelt is very much like Google Chrome and offers the same in speed. It differs in it has columns on the left and right to hold all your Facebook and Twitter contacts. You can quickly connect to all your contacts,share links and media, and view status updates. Rockmelt works very nicely if you need to constantly be in contact with your Facebook friends or simply aggregate your RSS feeds. Unfortunately there's not much else to it. One could just as easily add extensions on to Chrome, Firefox, or any other browser to accomplish the same thing. I also think the people that aren't tech savvy enough to get add ons for their browser will never use Rockmelt, they'll most likely just keep using Internet Explorer. This browser is basically a Chrome version of Flock, the browser based off of Firefox.

I attempted to use Rockmelt for a week just to see how much I liked it. In my opinion it would work nice as an add on, but by itself, there's not enough substance.

I've recently started a new job working for a company creating html emails. They send out magazine renewal notices, event notices, advertising, etc. Designing for email is a entirely different beast than designing for web.

Designing for emails, require one to take their html and css knowledge back about 10 to 15 years. Forget about html5 or css3, think simple tables with very rudimentary inline styles. Even then be careful because that doesn't always work. Email clients such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail, and outlook all render html and css very differently. Heck, outlook 07' uses a word processor (word 07') to render html and css, this means standards and best practices is out the door. Everything you know about internet design is wrong if you're talking email.

Here is a few things I've picked up so far

• Nothing goes above the "body" tag in the html. Any thing above this is almost always striped out by all email clients
• Don't attach a style sheet. Think about it. if you get an email, are you going to download a style sheet to view it? Everything needs to be in-line css. Not to mention an unknown recipient might not trust your email enough to download a style sheet too.
• No Adobe Flash or JavaScript, stuff like this sets off spam flags in most email clients or they my not even work to began with. You don't want your email going directly into the spam box
• TEST! You thought developing for the web was pain? Email is ridiculous. Nothing works across the board, what works for one email client won't work for another. Apple based email clients offer css3 support while Microsoft outlook is using a rendering engine from 1995. I'm not an Apple fan boy, but you gotta like the support for standards that apple offers.
• K.I.S.S, keep It Simple Stupid. Words to live by. When in doubt, go as simple as possible.Simple tables (no colspans) with simple inline styles, no padding, no margins, no pseudo classes, basically design for the web as it was in 1995.
• Always label your alt tags because some email programs will not show images, also try not to put important content into an image for the same reason. You want people to be able to read your email with or without images.

I've seen hundreds of articles stating why you should stop using Internet Explorer as your web browser and use something better. The one thing they're missing is, the average person doesn't care, or even know what a browser is for that matter. This list is for the non-geek.

First let's start with, what's a browser? This is the program that let's you surf the internet. By default, if you own a Windows OS based computer, you're probably using IE (Internet Explorer). You click the little IE icon and magically the interwebs appear on screen. But what you don't realize is, you're missing a much richer experience on the web and more by using IE. Most people don't know they have choices in browsers. Here a few reasons to download a different browser and kick IE to the curb.

• 1. Microsoft Monopoly - I'll get on my soap box for a moment and say, why support a company trying to dictate how the internet is constructed and used. The internet should be open to everyone. Microsoft should not be the one to control the internet. Most people can agree monopolies are bad, so why support one of the biggest in the technology field.


• 2. Security - There are a plethora of viruses on the internet waiting to take over your computer and millions of malwares that want to steal your personal information. You can go get an anti-virus program which could protect our computer from any virus. But then you have internet explorer which acts like a gateway to all the spywares and malwares and basically makes your anti-virus software useless. IE makes infecting your computer relatively easy through two features called ActiveX and Active Scripting. These technologies were designed specifically for the purpose of giving websites more control over a your computer. But obviously, this can be bad.


• 3. Missing Out - Internet Explorer doesn't work with web standards. What this means to you is you're not getting the experience the web designer intended you to have. IE can butcher the design of a website. The way you view a site through IE could be very different on another browser. The site could not look as nice, be missing features, or not even work right. You would never know what you're missing by using IE.


• 4. Bugs! - IE is known for making your computer crash. Nothing is more frustrating than when looking at something or working on a project your computer crashes and you lose everything you were doing. Other browsers don't do this, at least as much.


• 5. Freedom - Other , better, web browsers are free! it's usually 1 or 2 clicks and you have a new improved browser. It won't cost you a penny to upgrade to something better. Other browsers out there are more secure, cleaner running, faster, and present sites the way they were intended.

I realize in some corporate situations you may not have an option. The network applications may require IE6 or the IT department may not allow you to install anything to your computer. Not much we can do there other than hope they eventually update their system for the 21st century. To those at home though, you really really really, did I mention really, should switch from Internet Explorer to something else. Don't be scared, you'll still have IE on your computer (Microsoft makes it hard to get rid of), so if you don't like enjoying a free open source web, you can go back anytime.

But you should at least download and try one of these- Firefox, Opera, or Google Chrome.