Many sites use tiny images for patterns. Sometimes these are only one pixel images for a color, but usually it is for a pattern with a more subtle effect. These images can be anywhere from 2 pixels in total to 4 or 5 pixels square or larger. The trouble is that Internet Explorer has a hell of a time displaying these patterns whenever they cover a large area such as the background behind an article. IE simply fills the pattern in too slowly.

In business, etiquette is very important, but even more important is respect for privacy. I find myself repeatedly saying that "client data is not mine to lose". Nor is it mine to simply give away.

I received an email recently that was addressed to about 30 recipients, none of whom I knew and none of whom knew me. Yet every last email address and many of the names were there in my inbox -- in every one of our inboxes.

Problems 1: Spies, hackers, crackers, script kiddies and their ilk

Whether for entertainment, practice, or for profit, there are many prying eyes out there. Larger companies deal with spies (think 007 but without the accent, the martini, the wealth, the glamor, the explosions, the tuxedos or the women) while all of us deal with internet diseases like hackers, email scrapers, and spammers. It\'s like the flu, not only can anyone get hit by it, but at some point everyone does. Fortunately there is a simple cure as you\'ll see below.

It is pretty simple to copy all of the files to a subdirectory. If your URLs are hard-coded and absolute then a quick search and replace with almost any editor can change http:www.mysite.com/ to http:www.mysite.com/mirror/.

Many content management systems and ecommerce packages such as osCommerce will offer a configuration file or setting where you can edit this once for the entire website.

During the web development process errors and cross browser inconsistencies are inevitable.

Sometimes these are simply a matter of the someone viewing a page while you are in the process of uploading the supporting files. Just refreshing a page while you are overwriting the style sheet can leave a user with a page that displays with no CSS at all. For a professional web developer and for most clients this is unacceptable on a live website.