Instead of users having to print out exactly what they see on screen, you can get rid of stuff like nav, sidebars and plug-ins from pages, enabling them to print out only say the main content.

Great! So there I was, merrily creating a print-specific stylesheet for my site ……. only to find that I then had problems getting the printouts to flow across more than a single page in – of all things – Firefox!

Yes, Firefox – the poster child of open source software -has a print bug in it. Sad to say, it all worked fine in IE6 and IE7.

The details and thankfully the solution are described on Jaffer Haider’s blog

The simple answer, it seems, is to add the overflow:visible property to any of the div elements you want to appear in your printouts for users.

It will be fun updating my web skills, getting my head around new technologies and reminding myself of “old” ones.

I’ve decided to re-build the whole site using standards-based design principles. Yes, pages using table based layouts are on their way out.

So I’ve spent my christmas break reading lots of CSS manuals and design books like Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design, picking the brains of some of my esteemed colleagues regarding CSS design and collecting my thoughts.

And now I’m ready to get on with it.

I’ll use this site along the way to share my discoveries as I work through the re-build. Hopefully it will encourage folks who might be wanting to build their first web site or take their current site to a new level to get on with doing it.

So off we go………..