At first glance, iFrames may look like a quick and easy hack for your website’s needs, but after weighing the pros and the cons, an iFrame is almost never the best solution.

An iFrame (introduced in HTML 4.0) is an in-line frame that can be placed anywhere on a web page, and is used to hold content. Navigation buttons can reside outside of the iframe and when clicked, only the content in the iFrame changes. An iFrame is a newer alternative to an HTML frameset or “regular frames”. Framesets share almost all of the disadvantages of iFrames and have many additional disadvantages.
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“As an owner of a small business with no product or service that can really be sold online, do I need a company web site?”

The answer, there is very little that can’t be sold over the Internet. There are over 30 million people shopping online, buying everything from music to cars to real estate property. Research predicts that revenues will be over $300 billion in 2005 and will grow at a rate of 30 to 50 percent over the next few years. These numbers alone should be enough to persuade you that your business should be online.

Regardless of whether you sell your services or product online, you should at the very least have an online presence so that customers, potential customers, partners and even potential investors can easily and quickly find more information about your company, the products and services you have to offer, as well as how to contact you.
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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used within the HTML behind your Web site as a way of controlling how each page is laid out and what elements on it look like. For instance, you can use CSS to make headings in your copy a standard size across the whole of your site.

CSS has been around for several years and is supported by all the major browsers available today, including Internet Explorer for the PC and Mac, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Using CSS on your Web site will give you several benefits:

Makes your Web pages snappier
By using CSS and writing your HTML code to match standards like ‘XHTML Transitional’ or ‘XHTML Strict’ you can decrease the ‘render time’ of your pages. This is the time it takes between downloading the page and actually showing it on screen to your Web site visitor.
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There’s a new iPod on the scene—the iPod nano—and you need one. What follows are our first impressions of this very impressive little player.

The iPod nano comes in two colors (white and black) and two configurations ($199 for 2GB, and $249 for 4GB). Each model stores music on a memory card rather than a hard drive, very crisp color display, and—like current full-sized iPods and the now-old iPod mini—sports a click wheel. Unlike with other iPod models, you’ll find the headphone port on the bottom of this iPod, next to the dock connector. The Hold switch remains, all alone, on the iPod nano’s top.

The nano is as thin and light as Steve Jobs says, weighing just 1.5 ounces, and is as thick as a stack of six credit cards. Despite its small size, the markings on the click wheel are clear and the click wheel is responsive. The screen really does look awesome—it’s very bright and readable. And the nano feels perkier than my other iPods, scrolling very quickly through a window full of songs, moving rapidly from one screen to the next, and flying through pictures.

In the iPod nano’s narrow box you’ll find the iPod itself, a USB 2.0 cable, Apple’s earbuds, two sets of foam covers for the earbuds, and an iPod Dock Adapter—a white plastic insert that will fit in future iPod dock connector accessories.

I can hardly wait until the next generation of iPods.

reviewed by: Dean Sauls

iPod nano review

overall rating: very good
Get an iPod Nano