Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
AARP has some very cool free games on their site. In honor of Mothers Day and moms everywhere they have Mahjongg: Mom Jongg. It’s just like online Mah Jongg with Mom in mind.
I replied to a Craigslist ad the other day for someone looking to update their website. They replied that they wanted several things:
When I saw that they were using WordPress for their site I realized that everything that they wanted and much, much more was readily available as a WordPress plug-in. If you haven’t been there before I would like to invite you to
I heard from someone the other day who said that they specialized in “Creativity and Uniqueness” in their website design. I went to see what sites that they had done and to me they all looked the same. The sites were all done in Dreamweaver or something like that. None of the sites validated and they were all made in tables with JavaScript navigation for rollovers, black backgrounds, lots of straight lines and no shadows.
They all had some sort of Flash slideshow or YouTube video embedded, but creative and unique? I don’t think so.
I’ve seen quite a bit of this lately where graphic designers discover Dreamweaver, KompoZer, or even FrontPage and decide that they are “Website Designers” as well. Some graphic designers do web design very well and are concerned about usability and web standards as well as graphics, but if what I’ve seen lately is any indication most don’t.
The sites that I saw did all have graphics that were very well done. I think that graphics were by far their strong suit, but you can’t take a site design from 1999 add a slideshow or video and call it “Creative and Unique”.
After I put up my new site design last week there was one glitch that was driving me nuts. In Internet Explorer only, the menu border displayed fine on my site, but in my blog the menu was missing most of the top border. The site looked fine in Firefox and others, but in IE there was whitespace where there should have been border.
I Googled the problem many different ways and I found lots of people with IE borders “issues”, but no solution that helped until I tried “border doesn’t display in ie” and got to page 5. The post on hellorobot.org called “IE’s Disappearing, Reappearing, Broken Borders” was a lifesaver.
Apparently the problem is that Microsoft, even though they give it lip service, doesn’t care about standards (I know, you’re probably shocked). They have their own attribute called “layout” which was hiding part of my border. I had never even heard of such a thing before, but it is explained in another post mentioned called “On having layout“. Apparently there are several elements that have layout by themselves along with some different combination of elements that add it as well.
It turns out that there is a simple solution of adding “zoom:1″ to my CSS for that element that fixes the problem, but since zoom is not a valid CSS property, the CSS for my blog will not validate. I think I would rather have it look and work well in all browsers rather than having it validate, but why should I have to choose? Microsoft and IE, WOW!
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Quinns Rocks Bed And Breakfast.
This site looks like a paradise. If I ever get to Australia I am going to seek out Quinns Rocks. It’s a small site, but in a very few pages it gets across everything that they need to. A beautiful and relaxing vacation place.
The site looks like a beautiful sea and has curves and shadows to give it some depth. The navigation is clear and easy to find and use.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
An impressive collection of free open source code for visual effects. Ninety six in all. Very cool stuff will keep you entertained for hours.
Because they are open source if you have access to a Flash editor you can download, edit, and publish these effects to your own site.
Almost everyone knows one of the best ways to get high rankings from the search engines is to have lots of pages link to yours. The question then is what are the best kind of links to get?
There are many things that you can do to get links to your site that I haven’t mentioned here and I found a really good post by Hamlet Batista called “Baiting and Beseeching — Obtaining the right mix of chasing links and getting them to chase you” it’s worth the read.
I was thinking what to do for this wonderful achievement and recently I have had several potential customers tell me that they want their blog to look like their site.
When I tell them that I can make it look like whatever they want, they tell me “but your blog doesn’t match your site!”
I decided not to be the plumber with the leaking pipes in his house or the body man driving a rusty car and spent the last couple of days redoing my entire site. You may have noticed that there were no other posts this week.
I wanted a clean look that had lots of whitespace to make the reading easier and navigation that was clear and easy to find and use. Once I decided on a new design WordPress makes it pretty easy change over. I only needed to change 4 files and all of the 599 pages change, but the regular site is 160 pages (plus a bunch that I dropped) and I had to change each one individually by hand.
You may be saying to yourself “isn’t that what external CSS style sheets are for?” changing all of your pages at once. Well the answer to that is yes and no.
My site was the first job I did when I started this business over two years ago. I have learned much about seo, css, web design and my style has changed quite a bit since then. It also was made in several “layers” at different times and originally I just threw in the blog as an afterthought. Because my blog has become such an important part of my site I wanted it to look like it fits right in and my old site design didn’t lend itself very well to a WordPress theme.
Most of what I’ve learned make the site look better and also make my job easier when it comes to many things including changing the design. So I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade the source of all of my pages and any changes in the future should be much quicker and easier (famous last words).
I’ll be cleaning it up for a day or two, but please let me know what you think of the new look. I welcome any comments or suggestions.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Tischlerei Klehn.
I think that you can tell that this site is for a carpentry, woodworking, construction company even if you can’t read the words.
I like the pencil on the notepad for navigation and the gallery of their work right up front.
The only thing that I’m not crazy about is the tan text on the brown background. It’s a bit hard to read.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
A game of airport (in)security. So true to life it’s very funny.
There are many games on this site, but this is one of my favorites.
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