Default link styling and accessibility

I’ve noticed that more and more designers are removing the default styling of links. By default, a link will display an outline when it receives focus from the keyboard. In other words when using the tab key to navigate through links on a page, each time you advance to a link, that link is highlighted visually by default. An outline will appear around the link.

Artemis Capital Partners website

I helped Artemis Capital Partners establish a new website for their investment firm. The site features a straightforward design and is built using using ExpressionEngine to facilitate site updates and provide a foundation for future site enhancements.

Grid overlay via CSS and a PNG

While working on a site’s CSS, I’ve been using transparent PNGs to overlay a grid image on the page in order to align design elements to the grid. Previously, I specified a repeating background grid image on the body tag, and commented it out when I didn’t want to see the grid. That works fine, but any child elements that use background images or colors will sit on top of the grid, obscuring it. And the repeating grid image will take the place of any background image which is supposed to be part of the design.