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B2B Marketing Mistakes, Top Secret CSS Code

Posted by TimSlavin at September 18, 2004

Welcome back. Hope your week was productive. I'm still out in California working for a few clients while my wife wrangles our two little kids. They're behaving, so far.

This week I came across two excellent resources, neither of them posted on the website. One is an amazingly simple but useful report from MarketingSherpa called Top Ten B2B Marketing Mistakes. Some of the content applies to B2C. Their report is a useful reminder for any business or organization.

The other resource is a perfect example of how Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is very much a rough draft technology. For the new site design I want a layout with a header, four columns underneath the header, and a footer under the four columns. I've scanned books at Borders and read dozens of websites to find simple CSS code for my layout. Then last Saturday night, sitting on the floor at Borders bookstore, I found this buried code snippet which has exactly the logic I would expect from CSS (but have yet to find):

#column1, #column2, #column3 {
 float: left;
 padding: 0;
 margin: 0;
 text-align: left;
}
#column1 {
 width: 125px;
}
#column2 {
 width: 250px;
}
#column3 {
 width: 200px;
}

Guess what? It works. All the CSS multi-column layout code I've seen lacks this simplicity. While I had to change the column widths, this code works like a dream. Yet it was buried in one book out of the 12 I scanned and the 40 or so CSS websites I've visited. As a side note, I would put the padding and margins in a CSS div tag for content within each column; that saves you calculating column widths to please IE web browsers.

Finally, the new site design should be up this weekend or next. I spent 11 hours yesterday setting up WordPress only to find that the tool can only display standard weblog journal entries, not a mixed display of journal entries and headlines. So I may have to move back to the latest from pMachine, their Expression Engine, which solves problems that led me to switch last summer to MoveableType. There is no rest for the wicked...

Have a great week. Thanks for your visits and for reading. Let me know if I can help you.

Tim

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