John Martz from Robot Johnny had been commissioned by Derek Balmer, the creator of  Momentile, to create a cheeky greeting page for users who visited the website using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. His post shows his process in producing the final image and is well worth the read.

Very cheeky and light-heated, which is refreshing (not to mention creative!) because I think we, as web developers and designers, are starting to get a little arrogant and elitist towards people who may not know better then to upgrade to a better browser.

Click through to robotjohnny.com and take a look and post a comment on his blog if you like his work.

Stefan Vervoort over at WP Toy Has put together a fantastic check list for Wordpress Theme Designers.

The list covers theme definition, required style sheets, pages and Blog elements. It also lists the standard CSS classes that Wordpress uses such as .alignleft & .alignright (often overlooked by many theme developers).

Hit up this link to download the PDF.

I hate Internet Explorer – I really do.

As a web designer there is nothing more annoying that designing the perfect site, writing the perfect, standards compliant code only to find IE looks like garbage in Internet Explorer 6 and , to a lesser but still painful extent, 7.

But, as a good web developer ignoring IE entirely is not an option. Especially when IE6 and 7 combined still command something in the order of 75% of the market (if not more) so we deal with the problems as best we can.

One of these such areas is the PNG transparency support in Internet Explore 6 – more specifically, the lack there of.

Over at Net Tuts they have a great Videocast featuring 5 techniques on how to fix the transparency issues in Internet Explorer 6. The cover the following techniques:

Unit PNG Fix

DD_BelatedPNG Fix

IE7.js Fix

Twin Helix Fix (from Angus Turnbull)

Don’t Fix It! (Seriously)

These solutions have there pros and cons and I’ll leave it up to you to choose. Click here to check out the screen cast!

Over at Cats Who Code they have a great about speeding up your Website using Apache’s mod_deflate and header expires. It’s a guest post by Hayes Potter – a 13 year old web developer!

Whilst I have some reservations about the extra CPU load on deflating files vs just waiting for the page to load, it’s defiantly a good read and has some smart tips.

Head on over to Cats Who Code for the full article.

Since I moved to Firefox 3 I’ve been having issues with how it caches websites that i’m developing. Many times in order to see changes I had made to code I would have to close firefox and re-open it – Very painful when I have many tabs open. My other option was to use Safari to test my sites in and I have no interest in doing that so I thought it’s time to have a look at the Firefox config settings.

To get to the config settings type about:config in the Firefox address bar. Set both browser.cache.memory.capacity and browser.cache.disk.capacity to 0. Alternatively, you can also set browser.cache.disk.enable and browser.cache.memory.enable to False.

Restart Firefox and your pages will load fresh each time. If you have any other tips like this I would love to hear them! Please comment away