This article details how to produce a product category list with associated images and text. This is the sort of thing you would see if you did a search on Amazon.

I am going to start by showing the finished product as this will help you visualize what we are going to achieve along the way. Figure 1 below shows a smaller version of the task ahead.

Figure 1

We are going to make a similar display but without using tables as in my view the information presented is not tabular and does not have a logical correspondence between rows and columns. Even if you do present a good case of why this should be in a table, please don’t comment on this as we are interested in the layout techniques rather than perfect semantics (for this example). The techniques presented here can be used in other layouts that are certainly not tabular and will prove useful in many situations.

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I met with some people last month that run an e-commerce website. Their story is an all too familiar one. They’re not selling as much product as they had hoped to and want to see what can be done to change the situation.

In this article I’ll share with you what I shared with them. It may surprise you to hear some of my suggestions.

The beginning of our conversation was your typical SEO talk. It started with an explanation of how Google (and others) ranks web pages. The typical reader of this blog will be familiar with this, so I’ll skip it. But if you need a refresher, read the article Google’s PageRank Explained.

After explaining to them the significance of inbound links to their site it didn’t take long before they asked the question that always gets asked at this point, “How do we get people to link to our website?”

I deflated their spirits be telling them that it’s not easy. You see, e-commerce sites, like theirs, don’t typically attract people wanting to link to them. Nobody, naturally, wants to link to a website that sells jewelry or Hungarian food condiments and trying to get people to link to a site they don’t want to can be an Lose Weight Exercise in futility. I know, because I’ve done it many times.

But hope is not lost. There is a way…

The short answer is you have to give people a reason to want to link to you. But how does an e-commerce site do that?

That’s what we’ll look at in this article. No, it’s not your typical, “How to acquire links” article so read on.

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It’s time for the annual survey where we ask what apps are you using? It’s real simple, tell us what tools, apps, languages and add-ons you are currently using to get your job done?

Here are mine:

• Operating System – XP
• Graphics Program – Adobe Fireworks
• Programming IDE – Visual Studio 2008
• Languages - ASP.NET, C#, JavaScript, CSS
Source Control – Subversion
• FTP - SmartFTP and FileZilla
• Browser - Firefox and IE7
• Mail Client – Gmail
• Anti-Virus – AVG Antivirus
• Firewall - ZoneAlarm
• Others - Firebug, Trillian

What are yours?

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Now that IE7 has overtaken IE6 in usage it has become more common to find authors trying to use position:fixed in their layouts. Therefore in this article we will try to address some common problems and misconceptions when using position:fixed (we will not be covering the background-attached “fixed” property but you can find out more about that here if you are interested.).

Note that position:fixed doesn’t work in IE6 and under so you will need to be using another browser although we will try to accommodate IE6 with some alternate styling.

Fixed to What?

Fixed positioning varies from other positioned elements in that the element is always placed in relation to the viewport and not a local stacking context. Even if you add position:relative to a parent of the fixed element it is still placed in relation to the viewport.

This can present problems if you want to place the fixed element inside a centered layout and then place it at a certain position within that centered layout.

In order to have a positioned element inside a centered layout you can simply let it occupy its normal position in the flow and not specify any position values for top, bottom, left or right at all. This will enable the element to become fixed at that point while the rest of the content scrolls.

We’ll work through some simple examples to show this in effect.

We’ll start with this simple Example

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