Irie Tools (Business & Technology)

Well, I am one step closer to releasing the next version of Irie Pascal (it’s still probably a few months away so don’t get too excited, but it’s getting closer). I have finished reading two of the four books I just bought from Amazon.

1. “Pro CSS Techniques: Real-world CSS techniques for real-world CSS professionals!”
2. “The Design of Sites: Patterns for creating winning web sites”

The other two books I will read later, but now I can move on to the redesign the Irie Tools website. The current Irie Tools website uses old-fashioned table based layout with just a little Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) thrown in. The new redesigned website will use CSS for doing all presentation (including layout). Besides just being the “right thing to do” I am hoping see for myself the benefits that everyone talks about, namely:

• More precise control over the layout of the site
• Easier site updates
• Improved accessibility
• Improved search engine rankings

More important than these benefits is the chance to learn more about building websites using XHTML and CSS, so that I can take another look at the XHTML engine I have designed and make improvements before I actually start building the engine. By the way, the best book on CSS I have read so far is still the first book I have read on CSS, namely “CSS: The missing manual”. A link to this book on Amazon is below.

CSS: The Missing Manual