I've seen your blog entries about how to create a search box for Google on my site, and how to create a search box for Google Images on my site, but what I'd love is a single, consolidated search box for both. Is that possible?

I can't seem to get a straight answer when it comes to how a site is coded/built and the affects that this has on SEO. After having taken a few web courses (design to SEO related courses) it seems to me that the "best practice" with regard to building a site that is search engine "friendly" is with CSS, utilizing as few tables as possible. I've been told by numerous instructors that tables can adversely affect SEO rankings and they don't recommend constructing with tables (they consider this an outdated approach).

However, I work with a couple of web developers that swear this isn't true and refuse to move away from building sites with tables. Can you solve this mystery for me once and for all? And, if CSS is the way to go, should I go to the expense of having sites developed with tables converted to CSS in order to improve SEO??

Hey Dave! I'm only about twenty years behind here, but I want to start building my own Web site and am kind of drawing a blank on where I should store the files. I think that's called "site hosting" [ed. yeah, it is :-) ] but every single person I talk with is somewhere else, so I'm at a bit of a loss. Where should I host my new Web site? Don't need much, it's probably not going to be too busy...

I am a big fan of both your blog and problogger, and both of you seem to be fans of the Chitika ad network, in addition to various other ways that you make money. Darren says that it's a big revenue stream for him, and you've written that minor tweaks in how you have things set up on your blog have resulted in some major bucks coming your way too. I'm in! But, how do I get started?

I keep hearing from you and others that I really need to be tracking how people use my Web site and that I should be collecting "aggregate traffic statistics" and such. I've heard that Google Analytics is good - and the price, free, is great - but I'm not really clear how to use it and add it to my site. Can you please step me through the process, Dave? Thanks!

Now that I have some songs available through the iTunes Music Store [ed: it's now just the "iTunes Store" since it's more than just music. :-) ] I want to link to what I have from my MySpace profile. I don't want to have a per-song or, planning for the future, per CD link, I want to link to all the results people get from searching for my name in the Store. Can that be done?

An artist buddy of mine created a little favorites bookmark icon for my web site [they're properly called favicons or, if you want to use the name of the file, "favicon.ico" files] but I don't know how to specify on my pages that I have one of these favorites icons. Can you offer up the HTML I need?

I need some advice. My wepage is more or less being held ransom by my webmaster because of her knowledge of html. If I need to make a change of any kind I need to wait a week plus for anything to get done. Now, she wants to charge me an up-front fee for any changes before they are done. I can't even put on any links because I have to check with her first. How tuff is it to use html and if I was able to learn it how can I get my web page away from her?

Dave I'm a newbie with Mac so bear with me. I learned how to use "Grab" for screen capture and post it into an email and it works great. However when I tried to paste the same picture into a Mac forum to show them an error message paste was grayed out. What did I do wrong?

I saw that on the anniversary of 9/11 you changed your Web site home page to have a thick black border and some commemorative words. Nice, low key, and still effective. How'd ya do it?

Just a quick question: as I'm figuring out HTML, I've learned that "<b></b>" will make the inner text bold, but why are we seeing "<strong>" being used these days? Is there a difference?

I've been writing some scripts to display large directories of images in HTML in an automated fashion and not infrequently the static HTML generated ends up not matching the underlying images on the server. I could generate the pages on-demand, but it's too processor intensive. Instead, I'd like to know if there's a way I can automatically display an "image no longer available" graphic instead of just a broken link?

I want to add photos to my blog, and a buddy told me that I can use images from the Yahoo Flickr site. I don't want to get in trouble, though, so can you tell me if there's some way to identify those photographs and other images that are legal for me to republish?

I have a web site that I placed on the Internet in the year 2000. It consists of HTML 4 and Frames. At this time it opens in different browsers with no problem. With the advances of CSS and newer browsers running CSS more proficiently do you think the older web sites with frames will stop working correctly? I don't even know where to start with changing over to CSS as I have over 100 pages.

Is there a command I can use to stop people right clicking and saving copies of my images? I get annoyed when they take my work and post it on their website without permission. Thanks.

I'm trying to get my company motto tucked right under my site URL in my header using CSS and can't quite get it right. I tried <h4> </h4> instead of <p></p>. Motto is showing up above domain name, still having trouble getting motto under domain name. Here's my code:

and I have a bunch of complicated CSS, but it just isn't working. Help!

I've seen some professional service provider sites that include a nice little map within their About page, a map that actually hooks up to Mapquest or similar. I much prefer Google Maps, but am stuck: is there some way to actually embed a Google Map on my Web page or, for that matter, my MySpace profile?

I have been building a set of Web pages for events hosted by my local temple, and the Rabbi is complaining that when he uses Google to search for upcoming events, it's the older events that have already passed that are showing up, not the upcoming events. What a headache! Is there some way to put an expiration date on a Web page like you can on a carton of milk?

You have shown how to add eBay, Google, and Technorati searches to your own web page. Is it possible to add an Amazon search to your page, and how would you do it?

I notice that about two weeks ago your site changed subtly, Dave. Before, I'd click on "POST" to submit a comment and then wait and wait while it processed. Now it's still as slow (sorry!) but as soon as I click on that POST button it grays out so I can't click on it again. Cool. How do you do that?

On my friend's myspace profiles they have a color box around their comments and the text is in diffent colour too. I've asked them how they did it but they say they forgot. so how do you do it.

I recently noticed that a few of the sites I visit seem to be cloaking or hiding their links when they point out to another site. I've heard of this cloaking to hide affiliate links, but am wondering whether it's a good idea and why you, for example, don't mask your own links?

I noticed that my local newspaper's Web site now has the lead paragraph of stories magically pop up when I put my cursor over the headline link on their site. Nice! How can I do something similar on my own pages?

As far as I know, there's a big problem with duplicate content in the search engines, so I am paranoid about my dynamically generated content and want to use either a "robots.txt" file or a "robots.txt meta exclusion" to ensure that search engines don't see my content again and again. How do I do that?

I'm a happy subscriber to your splendid Blogsmart News newsletter and was glad to get a link to the amazing results with adwords lecture you did with Joy in the latest news. But I can't save it? How the heck do I save an mp3 file when the link is in an email message?

How do I add a Yahoo search box on my site? I can see you've written about Google, but Yahoo's impossible to decipher!

I have been trying to jazz up my weblog in various ways and have decided that it would be extraordinarily cool to add a daily sudoku puzzle. Problem is, I have zero programming ability. Is there any way to do this?

I'm a photographer and have a variety of pictures I'd like to contribute to the Wikipedia effort, but I'm completely stymied on how to actually do so. Can you offer some tips?

I was reading through some of your myspace help and it's great. thanks so much for letting me tweak my background without having to slap a bunch of stupid adverts on for your site! :) While I was reading your profile on myspace [dave's profile on myspace], I noticed you had a nice effect with some text that you somehow put into a box. How did you do that??

I read a ton of blogs every day and sometimes I see a video from YouTube that someone's included on their entry. I know how to do that [see Add YouTube Video to your Blog for a tutorial] but how do I easily copy a video from one page to another?

Can you give me the rudimentary HTML tags that I need to be able to create bold, italics, change font colors and include both hypertext references and images to my blog entries? Thanks!

I've been blogging for a while now and am having a good time, but I'm now a bit puzzled about how to expand into the next wave of content: video. Specifically, I bump into funny or informative videos on Google Video but have no idea whether I can embed it on my own page and if I can, how to do that. Can you offer some pointers?

I'm really upset. I was just visiting a competitors Web site and found out that they had links to my FAQ pages, but when you clicked on the links, their "frame" neatly wrapped my content, which made it seem like it was their content, not mine. That stinks, and I want to know if there's a way that I can kill or prevent this from happening to my Web pages?

Dave, how can you change the attributes of the Submit button (font, color, color of the button, etc.)? When I get the answer, I promise to buy you that chai.

I just bumped into something called "Google Related Links" and don't know much about it or how I can add it to my Web site (or whether I should). Can you explain what it's about, why I might add it to my site and how I'd do so?

How do i get a nice background on my page? I can find a very good one but it always says myspace on it but i try it anyway. How do i put the graphic into my background on my page?

I've been reading a lot lately about affiliate link hijacking and link cloaking. Do you recommend any particular link cloaking software or technique and/or are there any particular ones to steer clear of? I saw one 'Covert Affiliate' that in addition to cloaking affiliate links puts a tracking cookie on the visitors computer even if they don't click on the link. They talk about having the 'unfair advantage'... that concerns me that if you're doing something 'sneaky' that it could actually bite you in the butt down the road.

If I have a Google web search form placed in my site, how can I set it up so that there is one input box (for the web search) but two submit buttons - one for a web 'text' search, and one for a google image search? Is that even doable??

I have added a Paypal button to my weblog but I can't figure out how to put the text above or below the buy now button so that people know that they are buying before they click on it. I am just learning about HTML?

This is a really basic question, but I'm still just trying to figure all this Internet stuff out. I don't know any HTML. I would like to know how to a) place HTML in my coding to turn a paragraph color to red and b) increase the font size.

I have a search box on my Web site that I got from the Amazon Associates program and it's a nice addition to the site, except that I really want people to only have results from their books department, not all across the Amazon system. Is that possible?

How can I protect my website html pages, graphics, etc. from being viewed, and/or manipulated by casual viewers? IOW, what do I need to set up so that if someone tries to go to "www.mysite.com/pics" (for example), they would get a "no permission" message?

I love CSS. I would like to use CSS menus. I have seen several versions on the netover the last 12months (I currently use a javascript menu system). My biggest problem with these CSS menus is that you have to put the menu code into each HTML page as far as I can see). This means a menu change for a site must be updated in every page.

This seems to go against the idea that CSS can be used to change the look and feel of an entire web site by just chnaging the external style sheet. Do you know of a way of putting CSS menus information in an external file that can be linked or imported into the HTML?

I'm writing a webpage registration program for a local non-profit, and I've been trying action="mailto:myaddr@yahoo.com" thinking that it would send me the stuff that my CGI script will get (method is POST) but I don't see anything. Is there a way to see what my cgi script will see w/o having to do the server side stuff first?

I'm just starting out in the Web world and was just told by someone else who I respect that I should be careful with the JPEG graphics format because it's "lossy". I have no idea what that means, however. Can you enlighten me?

I am trying to make a web page and am having trouble with the HTML. I want to make some links at different places on the picture on the front page. Could you help me with the code? Right now the whole picture is a link, but I would like to make the ENTER sign a link as well. If you could just point me in the right direction
it would help a lot...

Dave, I have added Google to my webpage using the "Google free" code. Can you please tell me how can i by default place the cursor in google search box?

I've been reading your Creating Cool Web Sites book, and what I'd like you ask you is how do I put a picture on website? Even though you have mentioned it I am not sure what to write in the <img src='__" />. I am not sure where you get that part if you want to download a picture from the Internet. It would be a great help.

Hi there, I noticed, on a previous entry, somebody asked how to add a countdown timer to their website, well I am also interested in one for my website, on how long until the next clan match is for Socom II, am i able to get a visual countdown timer, where when people go on the website, they can watch it count down, also, could it say days, hours minutes, etc, and also maybe colourful.

I'm having a problem with a title block on one of my sites. When the browser window is below a certain size (about 750px in width), one of my absolute positioned divs overlaps another. How do I make it so that the browser just displays a scroll bar once this minimum size is acheived rather than starts overlapping my divs?

Dave, I have a email link on a web page. Set so when you click it, the email opens with the address and subject line populated. I want to have the cursor OR Hello show up in the Body of the email. I am told 'ONLY' with forms but I am sure I did this years ago. Here is what I have so far:

      "mailto:me@my-addr.com?Subject=Dear Kirk"

Do you know the code to finish it off?

I really enjoyed your article about the "mail to" problem many of us rely on for folks to contact us for one reason or another.

While I am just a geekette wanna-be, and am at best a stumbling dabbler in script and coding, I was wondering if you could share greater detail about how you scripted your contact form? When I took a look at the source code, not that I understand a lot of it, I was unable to determine how the message gets to where it needs to go without specifying the destination in the HTML?

Dave, I know that I can easily add links to my Web pages that let people click and send me an email message by specifying a mailto: URL. However, I've heard rumors that there are some problems with spammers snagging those addresses of my site? I hate spam, should I just avoid email addresses entirely?

Dave, I have read your Creating Cool HTML 4 WebPages and gotten into basic web-designing. I have one pestering question though. Say you have two frames, is there any way you can prevent the frames resizing if you resize your window? For instance, a maximized window viewing these frames is fine, but when it is not maximized it may cut off some information and pop that annoying scrollbar next to it. It can, anyway, disrupt ease and fluidness of the site.

Hello Dave, I work on Mac OS X and I have been trying to add a favicon.ico to my website's address bar, only to find that it only shows when I open it with Netscape or Firefox, all the other browsers like Safari and Explorer don't seem to recognize it.... Can you help?? It is driving me mad...

Dave, I'm writing something where I need to place various currency symbols in an HTML file. (euros, yens, and pounds) Is it best to use names like &yen; or numbers like &#165;? I presume just putting the raw text character in the file is bad.

"My question for you is, what are your favorite obscure tags? I'm not talking about <img> or <br> -- I'm talking about the ones everybody's forgotten about, like the <dl> tag. Other bits of obscurity (like weird CSS selectors) are welcome too, of course. :^)"

I've really learned a lot from your book Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML and CSS, but now that I have a site, I'd like to find out more ways to build traffic and maybe even make a few bucks off advertising. Can you help?

" On page 62 of Creating Cool HTML 4 Web Sites, the first line of code (<link type="text/css" href="mystyles.css" /> does not seem to work until I add 'rel=stylesheet'. I've tried it out on both IE 6.0 and Netscape 7.x."

<style type="text/css">
.bl              { color: #000; font-weight:900 }
.bl a:link       { color: #0f0; }
.bl a:visited    { color: #00f; }
.bl a:hover      { color: #000; background-color: #ff6 }
</style>

<a href="uses.shtml" class="bl">Google Adwords and Overture</a>

I am starting my own web design business and I could do with some assistance. Do you have any starting out pointers and how are the contract negotiated for service and provisions? Is there a special legal branch I should be contacting or is there already pre-made forms. I appreciate any and all assistance.

Some time ago I purchased your book, Creating Cool HTML 4 Web Pages. I have gotten a lot of use out of it. However, I am now getting my feet wet on Cascading Style Sheets and have come across something I did not see answered in your book. I am hoping you can answer these two questions.

1) I use <h3></h3> headers for the headings of columns in a table. I notice Internet Explorer adds an extra blank line under the headings before continuing text but Mozilla does not. How do I eliminate the blank line following an <h3></h3> header? I would like text to follow immediately below the heading.

2) Same question for horizontal rules. I do not want a blank line below a horizontal rule; I would like text to follow it immediately. How do I get rid of this extra blank line?

"I have been reading your "Creating Cool Web Pages (HTML 4), and I just understood how to make frames. However, I am having trouble with my links opening in the same frame.

For example, I have my links in my smaller frame, but all the pages connected to the links keep on opening in the same smaller frame. How do I change it so I can have them open in a new window, or open in the bigger frame?

"I have just picked up your new book Creating Cool Web Sites, and it's great stuff. I specifically read the chapter on how to increase your findability and am still wondering if there are even more tips and tricks about how to get good search engine ranking?"

I'm finding that some number of people are hosting my Janet Jackson "movie" by simply linking it in from their sites, meaning *I* get to pay for the bandwidth. Is there some way to prevent this?

"Hey Dave! I'm trying to explore tons of web sites to see how they're built and keep bumping into restrictions because my folks installed a "nannyfilter" on my computer. Is there some way to get around it so I can make my own decision of what sites to visit?"

"Help! I cannot view source code. I select it from the menu, but nothing comes up. Further, I cannot save pictures in their original format. I right click to do "save picture as" and it only provides me with a .bmp extension. What's going on?"

Can I place a Microsoft Word doc on my website for download? It works when I test it on my hard drive; but doesn't work once I FTP it to the website.

Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.

"I was hoping you could tell me where I can find info to solve a problem I'm having with one of the pages. I want my hyperlinks to stay the same colour as the rest of the text and not change at all, and i'd like to avoid the underlining too."

"I have purchased your book titled Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours which is very interesting and I have learnt many commands from that. Sir I have one problem. I have purchased some space for a website on the remote server. And I have designed my web site and once I got it launched from the system adminstrator. Now he has given me the user id and password for the SERVER (which is 250 Kilometers from me). The problem is I have changed my website files and I have uploaded these files on to the server using FTP. So to refresh what should I do in the sense what command should I use? Please send me the details"

"I've been looking all over the internet to find an average price for making a website and I can't fine a good estimate on the going rate. If you could point me in the right direction that would be great. After reading your book (creating cool HTML 4 web pages) and taking some computer classes I've now got my CIW certificate and am starting to build my first website for a client, but I don't know how much to charge!"