Solutions to Common Technical Issues
These pages address more complex issues that go beyond the basics; it’s not something you need to know to manage your website, but can help from certain technical standpoints and making your website more Search Engine and User Friendly.
Any Web Design Questions?
If you have questions that aren’t answered in these pages, then just ask in the box below and I will post a solution (if I have one!)
Flash
Embedding Flash is easy enough with the plug-in. However one difficulty that can arise is if the navigation menu fly-outs go behind the Flash movie. There is a solution to this, which involves rendering the Flash movie transparent to allow the menu to be seen. To fix this, go into HTML mode and paste the following immediately before the opening <embed> code and the second chunk before the closing </embed> code.
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed wmode="transparent"></embed>Any problems, just post with the code.
Flash and Internet Explorer
The transparency fix can throw up a problem with Internet Explorer not seeing your movie; fix this by inserting this code – in HTML view – <div style=”float:none; margin-right: 15px; margin-bottom: 10px;”> in front of the opening <object> tag and closing it </div> after the closing </object> tag. Remember that tags in html are nested so the first tag (where there are a series of tags) must always be the last tag to close. This trick is worth using as a default when embedding flash.
Text Formatting
Text you are entering can be copied as plain text or from Word and entered into your page by using the Text or Word editor on the toolbar; this cleans up your text to prevent any stray code being introduced. If you are copying text from another text editor, copy it first into Notepad (in your Accessories Folder) and then into the Wordpress Plain Text editor. If you don’t follow these steps you risk introducing stray pieces of code which will spoil your formatting. If you do find any strange formatting, clean up your code by looking in to the HTML code and locating the text that looks strange. The text will be surrounded by some HTML code – this starts with and angle bracket <code> and closes with an angle bracket for a forward slash </code>. Delete the opening and closing code and your page should look ok.
Colours
Colours are expressed as hex – expressed with a #, RGB (red, green, blue) expressed as three groups of numbers and HSL (hue, saturation, luminosity) also expressed as three groups of numbers. This site gives you an easy conversion tool if you need to convert one value to another