Wills On Ice With A Twist

Your cheap will   is written to help your family organise the disposal of your estate when you’ve bit the dust. Whilst yours may be simple, here are a few unusual ones.

Make A Will Don’t Leave It to Chance
It is practical to make a will. All of us understand this, but actually getting around to it seems such a chore.  How much consideration went in these “wills with a difference”?

Even the legendary magician and escape artist, Harry Houdini, couldn’t trick death. Having perished from a burst appendix, one of his greatest surprises came with the reading of his will. His magic supplys went to his former partner Theodore, who was in addition his brother. His mystical powers failed on the next items – his appreciable collection of writings on magic and the occult. He left these to the American Society for Psychical Research, but with the condition that the research officer J Malcolm Bird, who also was the editor of their journal, stood down. They declined the terms the compilation passed to the Library of Congress.

The stage rabbits that he utilised in his tricks vacated their hats and were divided around the kids of friends. Continuing the wierd theme, his gave his wife ten words, which was a secret code, with the avowal that he would employ these words to contact her from the afterlife. Each year for 10 years, following his death, she dutifully held séances, but Houdini never made contact.

Kozmic Blues and rock singer Janis Joplin had a short but interesting career. She made several rock anthems and four albums, including “To Love Somebody” and “Me and Bobby McGee”. After years of drugs and drink, she died from an overdose, aged twenty seven. Two days before her death in 1970 her cheap will      the sum of $2,500 to sponsor an all night party at her favourite bar so that her mates could “get blasted after I’m gone.” It must have been some party – that was a large amount of money back in 1970.

We’ve all heard of people that, unexpectedly, leave all their money to the dogs’ home, much to the disbelief of their relatives. Lot’s of family rows start when a will is read. As long as the person who made the will is of sound mind and not under duress, there is often little that can be done to contest such a decision.

Eccentricities apart, if you pass on without writing a will, those whom you would want to inherit will not necessarily be the ones that do so. You might have a partner of many years, but if you’re not married or in a legal partnership, he or she won’t get your estate, heedless of your aims and affirmations. This can be upsetting when it’s not clearly understood and can result in devastating fiscal consequences.

The up to date way to get your will under way is to go online and locate a cheaper wills      . However basic your designs are, it’s best to get the professionals to write it for you and you can be confident that you’re leaving things exactly how you would wish them to be.

XSitePro 2 Webeditor for newbies and professionals

Solid As A Rock

Where to Get a Deal on a New Car ?

One of the best things about Buyacar is that it is a valuable research tool while you are hunting around for tips, advice and information before you buy.

There’s plenty of background information on the car you wish to purchase, and the site’s new car reviews allow you to compare rival models within the area of the market that most interests you, so that you can make a better informed decision on what type, make and model of car would best suit your needs. Whether you opt to buy new or used model Buyacar provides everything you need when buying your next vehicle, well everything except the money! However, even then there are plenty of savings to be had on both new and used cars.

What’s more, you can make huge savings should you choose to buy a new vehicle through Buyacar, with reductions off list prices reaching as high as £6,000 or more! Used car prices too are extremely competitive often being cheaper than elsewhere.

The Editor’s Reviews also make interesting reading and you can even write your own new car review which could be seen by thousands of people each week.

And more news on the government’s Scrappage Scheme – apears it is working wonders for the motor industry by kick starting demand for new cars again. One company that has seen a remarkable rise in the sale of its cars since the scheme’s introduction has been the Korean giant – Hyundai.

One significant reason why Hyundai cars have been so successful is timing. The arrival of new models has freshened up the range and with their emphasis on smaller fuel efficient engines that are more environmentally friendly, these new Hyundai cars have captured the imagination of a significant number of customers and created a surge in orders. With so many new Hyundai cars for sale, the company has at times struggled to meet demand.

This is territory that Hyundai has not had to venture in before. The new Hyundai i20, however, can take on its toughest Fiesta-class rivals head to head and substitutes cutting edge style for cutting edge value and pricing. Economical, roomy, well-equipped, tightly built and covered by an excellent warranty, there’s nothing ambiguous about this little car’s appeal.

If the new Hyundai i30 family hatchback was a budget model in the mould of company’s previous offerings in this sector, it would probably be marked down as a good-looking vehicle but Hyundai have pitched the i30 into the mainstream and it should be judged by those standards. It is, as many customers are finding, a very good car that is genuinely difficult to strongly criticise on any other criteria

Buyacar is the ultimate one-stop-shop solution for selling and buying cars and so it’s hardly surprising that the number of people using this site continues to rise rapidly largely as a result of word of mouth recommendation.

Designing A Web Site For A Set Screen Resolution is Outdated

Introduction

In website development we regularly ask our clients what size screen resolution they would like us to build their new website at.

I was reading somewhere recently that apparently these days the only answer to that question should be ‘all of them’ and ‘none of them’. What this basically means is that new websites should be built to accommodate all different screen sizes these days, particularly with the increased popularity of hand help web browsers, smart phones, net books and the like. Of course there is also the other end of the spectrum in the new huge wide screen flat screen monitors. I recently treated myself to a 24 inch Asus which does 1920×1080 which is big enough to get two web browser windows on screen side by side, but if you make one of them full size, the majority or websites look, well, just plain odd!

What exactly is screen resolution then?

If you are not familiar with screen resolution, the simple answer is that it is the size of your screen. However, this can be quite misleading because it is actually the number of pixels that make up the display area on the screen of your monitor. Still not clear? Well let’s look at some examples to help clarify exactly what screen resolution is.

Currently what would appear to be the most popular screen resolution is 1024×768 (accounting for 62% of my website visitors). This is a screen that is 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high. What is a pixel? A Pixel, derived from the phrase Picture Element, is basically one of the thousands of tiny dots that make up your display screen. However, this does not necessarily determine the physical size of your monitor (14 inch, 15 inch, 19 inch etc) because most monitors are capable of displaying the screen in different screen resolutions. It is fairly accurate to say that if you want to run your monitor at a high screen resolution then you will need a large monitor, the larger the monitor the greater the resolution it can display at (assuming your graphics processor can support a high resolution).

All getting a bit technical? Put simply the higher the screen resolution the more things you can fit on your screen before they have to go onto the next line, or before you have to scroll down or scroll right.

What’s this got to do with Web Site Design?

When creating the visuals for a new website design, traditionally the experienced graphic designer would be working to a specific resolution in order to make sure that the design fits in your browser window without having to scroll right. (Thankfully most website owners don’t demand you make their pages so that you don’t have to scroll down anymore!)

The most popular screen resolution of 1024×768 will have areas of screen with nothing on them when viewed at a larger screen size such as 1920×1080 or larger so a professional ecommerce web design ideally has a mechanism for dealing with this issue.

When designing at a fixed resolution you can deal with larger display settings by either aligning the site to the left and having a huge great big gap to the right, or you can centre align the website in the available space and then the extra screen resolution will be on either side of the content area.

However, the sensible, modern day approach is to make the site flexible to accommodate all screen resolutions by creating ‘fluid’ content that will flow to fit the available page space irrespective of what size screen resolution it is viewed at.

Also, because of the increased popularity of the web the challenge for a website owner is how to engage your viewers and get them to stay on your website for as long as possible and show them as much content as possible. One way to help with this is to make full use of all of the available space. Two great big blank areas either side of a tiny web page is simply just a waste of space. Imagine if you picked up a newspaper or magazine and only half of the front page had got any content on it, the editor would get the sack for sure! So by creating fluid web pages, web site owners can take advantage of larger publishing spaces available on bigger screen users, whilst optimising content for display on smaller screens as well.

Another advantage with big screen displays is the ability to use the new area for re-publishing. Re-publishing is a way to put content from another area of your website onto a different page, thereby bringing it forward for the viewer. An example of this that we did on one site we created was to insert an alphabetical list of names of the products available on the website below the left hand menu on pages that were very long.

All pages tend to be different lengths, as determined by the content on the page, so we used a clever widget to create this list of product names and squirt it in the gap until it ran out of space. This was great for SEO too as it gave a direct link to specific product pages based on their product names without having to crawl through category pages first, also website users would often see something in the list they wanted and click straight through to the page and buy the item.

Ultimately this has evolved into what would now be thought of as a web 2.0 ‘tag cloud’ a list of tags that are usually user generated, to indicate and link directly to a specific content group or item. Using a tag cloud is a great way to fill stretched spaces on larger screens that you can fill with what are effectively links to other parts of the website.

How do you make fluid content?

Fluid content is quite simple to create, the majority will be words of course, which are naturally fluid so on a small resolution screen you might get 5-10 words to a row, on a larger screen you can get 20-30 words or more. However the challenge comes with images, and particularly website graphics. A photograph, whilst it can be made smaller and larger offline, it can’t be automatically resized by the web browser at the time of viewing (not taking into account the Zoom function in Internet Explorer).

The HTML code that makes up your web pages is again designed to allow fluidity by fitting content into the available page area, so some best practises that can be employed to make content fluid include not using tables in the code (which are depreciated these days now anyway), not setting specific screen width in pixels, use 100% instead. By fading images into blocks of colour in the website graphics, you can create a stretchable element that will scale to fit all window sizes. Use little boxes to put stuff in, these can then flow around the screen as required without having to be in any particular place, they also help to draw the eye to special offers, discounts, newsletter sign ups etc, and can of course be styled by your graphic designer with curves and shadows and gradients to look great.

Conclusion

Any of the many Loughborough web design companies will agree that a fluid scalable design is really the only option to consider these days, as it maximises the available publishing space on larger screens and with the rising popularity of smart phones and netbooks it ensures you site also works well on these smaller screens.