In simple terms… no! For years SEO types have worried about having duplicate content on their websites. Surely if your website contains content from another site you will be penalised by Google for copying!

This simply isn’t the case. Syndicated content has always been an important part of the web and will continue to be so. If a page on your site does use duplicated copy the page may be filtered and not necessarily perform well but your site overall won’t suffer.

This doesn’t mean you should go out to purposely rip content off other sites but if done honestly you really have nothing to worry about.

I was in a meeting the other day, where I was reliably informed that the font face Arial is in fact identical to Helvetica; they are one and the same. At the time I thought this was not the case but the re-assurance was such that I was open to accept that maybe I was wrong and they were in fact interchangeable.

Upon further investigation on the matter I discovered the following information about these two popular fonts:

Helvetica

Designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger. Helvetica’s design is based on the font Akzidenz Grotesk (1896), and classified as a Grotesque or Transitional san serif face. It was renamed Helvetica (Latin for Swiss) in 1960 after being revised.

Arial

Designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype. Was originally called Sonoran San Serif, and was designed for IBM’s bitmap font laser printers. It was supplied with Windows 3.1 in 1992 and only recently replaced by Calibri as part of the Windows Vista operating system.

Now whilst there is certainly common similarties between many of the two sets of characters there are very clear differences for ‘a’, ‘G’, ‘Q’, ‘R’, and ‘1′.

Of course as with many things in life there is always an element of ‘borrowing’ from whats gone before it would not be fair to say that Arial is a copy of Helvetica. However there are certainly not the same font; as Mies Van Der Rohe remarked: “God is in the details”. It always pays to check.

Related Articles:

• How to spot Arial
• Helvetica wiki entry
• Arial wiki entry

I recently read this post: http://carsonified.com/blog/design/setting-rather-than-resetting-default-styling/ which talks about using your reset CSS in a slightly different way; by making it your default styling.

Most of Miromedia’s sites, up to this point, have been built with a reset.css that attempts to start off a basic site which is consistent across browsers (based on Eric Meyer’s own reset.css). Once this reset is done we apply our own styles for the website framework, then the client specific CSS as dictated by the design. A fairly common approach.

Now, however, our philosophy has changed so that the reset becomes the cross browser baseline as well as the default setting for framework and CMS. This approach not only reduces the amount of CSS used in the stylesheet it also makes it much easier to read and diagnose problems. In addition to this we now place all website frontend CSS into one stylesheet, removing the need to use the @import rule. This reduces the number of HTTP requests and also helps prevent download stalling if a stylesheet cannot be found.

Changes like these help us to improve and develop our flagship product. Even at Miromedia we are constansly learning new things and new ways to tackle problems and increase performance.

Nielsen have released their list of the top 100 websites.  The list shows user figures for January 2010 and makes interesting reading.   There are some pretty obvious entries on there such as Google, Facebook & Youtube plus a few less known such as Geeknet & Pornhub!  Take a look and let me know what you think

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/sci_nat/10/internet_treemap/assets/nielsen_top_100_january_2010.xls

Following on from Richard’s demonstration of the broad share of the browser market that Internet Explorer has, it is worth noting that we developers and the designers still need to cater for the relic that is IE6. Whilst your everyday user will probably be using version 7 or 8 or more likely Firefox, the corporate sector are still tied to the old browser due to the massive project of rolling out a new version in a corporate environment.

ZDNet has this to say on the matter: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31328

So, despite thinking that we should code to the latest browser technologies and new web standards, we should always keep in mind the clients main customer market and ask the question ‘what is the minimum browser that the site should cater for’.

One good reference site for all things that IE doesn’t comply with is here: http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

According to Net Applications market share figures for January 2010 IE8 has just taken the world’s most used browser ‘top spot’ away from IE6.  The current top 5  and their market share now read as follows;

1. IE8 - 22.31%
2. IE6 - 20.07%
3. Firefox 3.5 - 17.01%
4. IE7 - 14.58%
5. Firefox 3.0 - 5.29%

The change in fortunes for IE6 is thought to be generally due to the decline in use of Windows XP.

We’ve recently been forwarded an email from an ‘SEO Company’ who approached one of our clients touting for business. Whilst I have nothing against healthy competition, I do get slight aggrieved by is the manner in which the approach is made. Fortunately, at Miromedia, we regularly report progress of our campaigns to clients - which in-turn demonstrates the true and current position of a website - and not the fabricated position in these ‘Spam’ style approaches. The first sentence alone gives the game away - typically ‘Excuse me for my unusual approach’. In fact, this is not unusual. It’s absolutely usual of someone fishing for business through spamming prospects. Surely, the most ethical and demonstrative way to generate business when you’re in the line of SEO, is via appearing highly ranked in search results - as Miromedia do. Not forgetting word-of mouth from our very happy roster of clients of course. After all, if they weren’t happy, then surely they wouldn’t be forwarding these to-good-to-be-true approaches would they?