<– This is what happened to 70% of the applications for a junior web designer position that I recently advertised on Bizcommunity.

Over and above the fact that the applicants who’s CVs managed to make it to the recycle bin did so because they didn’t have the necessary skills, weren’t residing in the right province, weren’t junior enough or generally didn’t fit the criteria, there were some common errors made by almost all these applicants that could have cost them the job even if they did meet the criteria.

I am a freelancer, there’s no HR department here, I got seriously frustrated with the quality of applications (not necessarily applicants); so what do you think your chances are when you’re up against hordes of other people applying for the same position at a larger company with an HR squad that doesn’t have insight into the position offered, just a checklist that should include these points: (more…)

I just finished reading this article on TechRepublic that discusses the topic of garbage HTML, semantics and validation – I am not going into the details of the article, but suffice it to say that it is an opinion piece based on some very simple (but accurate/effective) research that underlines what I have said about validation before (and also the reason for the name of this blog). (more…)

Yes, everyone’s doing it … following twitter and muti, there are frequent (almost daily) submissions of everyone’s list of favorite design resources, trends to watch, companies to look out for and a plethora of posts about people’s new year’s resolutions. So herewith my ten cents … now with added resolutions … I resolve to submit to these resources more frequently in 2009 (hope I didn’t jinx myself now). (more…)

The WordPress Classic Theme is one of my favorites (also the one used for this site), because it is simple and easy modify to your own taste. By default it is a fluid lay-out with absolute positioned sidebar (right) but with very little effort you can get it to look just about right.

The one aspect that is rather annoying though, is that when you disable comments on post or page, it still displays the comments footer and a message that comments are not allowed at present. Somewhat ugly if you create pages that you do not want your readers to comment on. “No problemo” says my friend and uber-l33t codemonkey … CharlVN and goes about hacking the theme. (more…)

…hope that title made sense

Right … so you’ve created your navigation bar and figured out how to do roll-overs the (CSS-)only way, but there’s no attribute or style property that allows you to target the link for the page that is currently being displayed. There is a “technique” that can help us out here though … we use specificity (quite a tongue twister yes). In other words we target specific elements by including the full path from parent to the last child. I’ll explain in full below… (more…)