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Seth Godin never has a scarcity of interesting thoughts to say about marketing, interacting with customers and the use of the web. Looking back at his articles posted at his blog regarding web design, he is challenging our thought processes on how most us approach design and custom web design work. Some designers agree; others call his work heretical. You decide.

Let’s start with “How to live happily with a great designer”

At CentreSource, we do everything we can to stay connected to the community around us. Recently, a great opportunity arose for us to donate our time to work with Ellie's Run for Africa (ERFA), a 5k Race and Family Fun day that is taking place in Nashville at the end of June, that has an amazing story behind it.

In the early years, some could argue that having a website, albeit bad, was still superior to not having one at all. Websites were not the ‘norm' and having one proved that your firm was unique and cutting edge. Fast forward 10 years and this is no longer the case – every business and organization is expected to have a website. But times are changing again! It is no longer acceptable to simply have a website. Now organizations are at risk to the dangers of a bad website.

One of CentreSource's strongest areas is custom application development. We've worked with a number of fantastic clients who have asked us to create a variety of applications including ones to handle franchise management, online book trading, and qualitative research.

We at CentreSource have recently been pushing all of our staff to become CSS masters. We've been testing, researching, training, and debugging our HTML and CSS code so that we might be able to serve our clients in the best possible ways.

Have you ever been designing a website, and everything seems to fit except for that plain white, black, or other random-solid color background? Well my brother recently passed a great design resource along to me that I only thought best to share with the rest of you: DinPattern.com. This site has about 40 free, ready-to-use backgrounds that will definitely bring a little spice to your webdesigns. Go check it out, and while you're at it, contact the creator, Evan, and thank him for his great work!

Those of you who read our newsletter know that for this Holiday season, CentreSource had a contest to find the website in the greatest need for a makeover. Companies were able to nominate their websites, which were then filtered by the CentreSource staff down to the 10 Top Worst Websites. Finally, the finalists were asked to launch their own grassroots campaigns and get their family, friends, and coworkers to vote for their site to win the grand prize.

Anyone that has written HTML and CSS has undoubtedly, at one time or another, faced a major headache attempting to acheive crossbrowser display uniformity. It's a problem that's not going to go away anytime soon, so we all just have to live with it for the time being.

I've noticed over the years, that everyone has a different approach to tackling this issue. Some prefer to use multiple stylesheets, one always for IE, the other for everyone else. Some code one stylesheet, but forsake uniformity for subtle, sometimes unnoticable, differences. I myself have used both of these techniques in the past. Not that there is anything wrong with either method; the end goal is to have a webpage that looks roughly the same in all the major browsers (IE 5-6, Firefox, Opera, Safari), and most importantly, without using tables for layout.

The web continues to impress me when I stumble across things that are relatively simple, yet done in such an elegant manner I can't help but notice. This was the case when I discovered the Javascript overlay techniques of Lightbox, Greybox, and Thickbox.

Lightbox

I made a fatal mistake... I thought I could start investigating PHP Frameworks and determine a clear winner. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that there is no clear winner... no clear Mr. Popular... and even worse, no clear source of info to even get started. Well, I hopefully made a nice step towards fixing the latter issue - I gathered every PHP Framework I could find and compiled them into a list at Wikipedia.