I should get the obvious out of the way first, I’ve gone & made my self a new site. I no longer have a mini site for work etc… then a separate blog, It’s all be brought together. It’s nice, simple & it gave me an excuse to play around with jQuery.

It’s still powered by Wordpress but I built my self a new theme from scratch. Nothing really tricky, the focus was on bold simplicity & I think it works, I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments. I’ve brought across some of the more worth while posts from my old blog & reformatted them to fit the new wider layout. Have a rifle through the old stuff if you haven’t seen it before.

New Job

On Friday I left *my previous employer* after being there for just over 2 years. I mostly enjoyed my time there but dealing with upper management was impossible, a bad decision seemed to be made by an MD on the hour every hour… any ways I felt it was time for me to move on.

So there is an empty chair waiting for me tomorrow morning at a new company in Retford, I’m pretty excited about that. The company is called Sale Group & they are a web based marketing/cms/e-commerce and shipping company. The MD really seems to have his head screwed on & has some serious enthusiasm for the company and his work.

I’ll also be back working with my close friend Phil Barker (hes actually going to be my boss!!!), we’ve worked together a lot in the past & our skill sets really compliment each other. As if that wasn’t enough a week tomorrow we are also going to be welcoming another close friend to the Sale Group team - Jamie Thompson. The three of us working together again should be seriously awesome.

Phil tells me that he has a list as long as his arm for me to be getting on with there. So it looks like I’m going to be busy. It might be a good idea if I nip off & have some sleep before my big first day. Wish me luck.

P.S. I’m not pregnant.

If usage continues in the same way we could possibly see IE 6 usage at 13% by next year. Which would be great!

*Stumbled upon at IE Death March

**Graph built with google charts

Once I established the site in my head & on paper, I brought that design into Fireworks. Then met with Phill from G&G to make sure the site really fit his needs. Amazingly I had hid the nail on the head first go From there I developed the site in HTML & CSS with a little progresive enhancement from jQuery. Once happy with the way it was rendering in the browser I converted it into a custom theme for Wordpress. Building the site on the Wordpress platform will allow any of the guys at G&G to add & update content when ever its convenient for them, which I think will be pretty often so watch out for some really interesting cars in the gallery.

My favourite part of this site is the contact form which drops down from the top of the page & if you happen to be slightly down the page at the time of clicking a contact link, it will even scroll your browser window to the top. To make this contact form possible I progressively enhanced the page via jQuery & then uses some AJAX techniques to submit the content with out reloading the page. Also to make this site accessible to a wide audience the contact system degrades nicely if you don’t have a javascript enabled browser, leaving you with an email link. Thanks to Jamie Thompson for helping me out with the AJAX.

I’d love to know what you think of the site & if you have any feed back on it.

p.s. unicorns are muther funking cool!

So You Want To Be A Graphic Designer For The Web?

Of course you do, chicks dig designers, they all drive sports cars, it makes you the life of any party… What you have to remember is there is no right or wrong answer with design, it’s all subjective. Even so there are some things you should understand to help with the design process.

Typography - Have a good understanding of it & why it’s important. Text exists to be read & good typography should help , not hinder. There is a nice guide to web typography at ilovetypography.com.

Colour Theory – Colour can bring a website to life, it can also bury it in the dirt. Understanding how not only colours but also contrasts work together is essential for delivering your message with a punch.

Understanding Web Technologies – this one is seriously important when designing a website. There is no point in doing the most amazing design if it’s not possible, or not possible with our sacrificing web standards/accessibility. As a designer you should fully understand the medium you’re working with no matter what it is.

Usability – is commonly defined as having three core components: effectiveness, efficiency, & satisfaction. Basically make the interface easy for the end user to use as possible. If it looks good but is impossible to use then - FAIL.

There are a million other points to consider when designing any thing, I couldn’t possibly cover them all but these could help you out along the way.

So You Want To Be A Web Designer?

Yes this is a whole different job to the other two, yes there is of course some over lap, & you will quite often find a graphic designer who is also a web designer or a developer who is also a web designer, & on a very very rare occasion you will find some one who is all 3, but that hardly ever happens.

Semantic HTML – Tables are out. Well formed semantic HTML is in. It brings you accessibility, usability & search engine optimisation. Make sure you don’t use any inline styles in your HTML, that’s best left for the CSS. If you are learning there are some really good HTML tutorials on htmldog.com, I also recommend reading HTML Mastery.

Well formed CSS – Important to understand CSS fully, adding class after class to a style sheet just to get some thing to look right is bad practice. There is a difference between knowing CSS & understanding it. Again there are some really good CSS tutorials on htmldog.com, I also recommend reading CSS Mastery.

Accessibility – The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) have a set of guidelines that deal directly with accessibility on the web. It’s a very worth while read for any serious web designer. It can be found here.

Cross Browser Compatibility – All browsers are not equal. It’s important to try & get your message to as wider spread of people as possible. Different people use different browsers. Browser checking from the very second start developing your web application really will help with this. There is nothing worse than getting to the end of a project, & opening it up in IE6 to find than it doesn’t render correctly or worse won’t run at all. I like to check all my sites work as best they can in IE6+, Firefox 2+ & Safari (Mac & PC).

So You Want To Be A Web Developer?

Well who wouldn’t, what’s more impressive than telling your friends you’re a developer & its sure to woo the girls too. Read on for some points that a good developer should pay attention to.

Server Side Language – There is a huge choice of web technologies available today. Proficiency in at least one sever side language (eg. ASP(.net), PHP, Ruby On Rails) is important. Regardless of which you chose we recommend developing it in a text based editor (e.g. Notpad++ (PC) or TextMate (Mac), not a WYSIWYG editor (e.g. Dreamweaver (although the code editing section of its good)). This gives you much greater control over the outputted code which should lead to you fully understanding every aspect of your Website. This also applies when you are writing HTML & CSS.

Database Normalisation - Normalisation is the process of designing a database in a way that removes data redundancy. It keeps the database fast & efficient. Un-normalised databases generally end in tears.

Commenting Code - This is important especially when working in a team. Not only does it stop you from forgetting what part of your code does, but it helps others not to break stuff if they need to work on it too.

Further Reading:

A List Apart - Bit of every thing here, well worth following.

W3 Schools - Ok It doesn’t look nice but its fantastic for reference.;

PSD Tuts, Vector Tuts, Net Tuts - Three fantastic sites with tutorials for doing all sorts of things.

Google Doctype - Jamie reminded me about this one. Very good resource & it keeps growing. Defiantly worth looking though.

Got any more advice for the guys who will be replacing us in a few years? Leave a comment.

Edit:

My friend Jamie has just done an amazing post for current developers who don’t work in web related fields looking to get into web development. I would probably recommend n00bs looking to get in to web development full stop to have a read of it too. So go check it out!

I know they will manage the 80 mile hike, & I wish them the best of luck. The guys have set up a Just Giving page, so head over to the site and donate them some cash monies!!!

Big thanks to Jon @ Pop Art Republic for doing the print.

Logo:

Stationery:

Website:

I’m pretty happy with the way its turned out, and I want to wish Chris the best of luck for the future with Highfield Mortgages.

Of course I’m happy to share this with any one else who wants it, download and enjoy!

Download The Icons

Download The Icons

They are nice big icons to suit Leopard (512px) and in .incs format.