I had a bit of a stroke of luck when I first began web development. I started to really dive in around 2005 at a time when tableless design was the only way to learn, which meant I didn’t have to unlearn developing with tables. For those who aren’t so familiar with the language of development, tableless just means avoiding the use of table unless you are dealing with data. What also was going out of trend was styling within an HTML tag. Read more…
Newest to Oldest forever and ever
The introduction of tablets and smartphones have created a need for web-based animation that goes way beyond the capabilities of the old stand-by that is Flash. Because of that, Flash has been experiencing a very long and somewhat painful death, leaving a hole in the web design / development community that’s in the shape of animated web elements. Adobe has responded to this need by creating Adobe Edge. This is how Adobe describes it:
“Adobe® Edge is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.”
For the past few months, I’ve been playing around with Edge and so far, I really like it. It gives me the option of animating virtually anything I want within a web design while using mobile (and SEO) friendly HTML5. For now Edge is free because it’s still in beta, but it won’t be for long!
Here’s a link to download it. Adobe Edge
We seem to be getting this request a lot lately … “can you design our new site for a mobile phone?” or “will our new site look okay in an iPad?” or “should we re-design our website to be more mobile-friendly?”
It’s a valid line of thought — and these are exactly the kind of questions clients should be asking. Mobile web usage is at an all-time high (see insightful article and “infographic” from DigitalBuzz). Some estimate that mobile Internet usage will overtake desktop Internet usage by 2014. The way your site looks in an iPhone, on a Droid, or in a tablet matters now more than it ever has. The W3C even has a standards section devoted entirely to mobile. Read more…
Every once in a blue moon, a WordPress plugin comes along that completely knocks my pants off (or socks, since we have a family-oriented office). The last time that happened, it was Ingenesis Limited’s Shopp commerce plugin. Read more…
Web designers, while they are in the business of simplification (for users and clients alike), have a number of challenges and complexities before them as technology develops and changes. Thankfully, there is no shortage of problem solvers in the web developer realm, and thankfully there are any number of resources for digging into an problem. Google-it. And you are likely to find an article, a website, a git hub repository, a plugin, or any combination of resources that will give you solutions, options, and explanations.
There have been quite a few incredibly useful features that were introduced in WordPress version 3.0, which came out over a year ago. However, perhaps my favorite didn’t come till half a year later when version 3.1 was released.
Previously, searching posts, pages or custom post types using custom field required a more-than-reasonable amount of work by directly querying the database with lots of nested SQL, which was fairly cumbersome. Fortunately, a new parameter was introduced into the query string arsenal streamlining this process. Read more…
In general, I absolutely love PHP. It’s flexible, can be object-oriented and is generally easy to learn. Even more, I love that it opens up the world of WordPress. However, I often get frustrated when I see new technologies like Haml and Sass popup that simply don’t integrate well with PHP.
Recently, a friend brought the new Wordless plugin to my attention. It’s a typical WordPress plugin that, using Ruby, enhances your toolset for creating themes by integrating some of those aforementioned technologies (Haml, Sass, Compass and Coffeescript), restructuring the theme’s organization and adding some great new helper functions. Read more…
Custom Fields within WordPress are no secret. There are hundreds of tutorials out there documenting how to easily automate them by simply adding a few lines to your functions.php file. Read more…
Recently, I’ve been feeling a bit boxed-in by the web technologies that I’m most familiar with (i.e. html & css, php & mysql, javascript). After a lengthy Ruby discussion with a developer friend, I decided that Ruby on Rails would be perhaps be a good solution to be desire to branch out. However, when I tried installing the latest versions of both Ruby and Rails for OS X, I ran into error after error.
Smashing Magazine (one of the greatest web resources for designers and developers) is redesigning their site and Elliot Jay Stocks is doing it. He posted a great article about web font usage.
Check out his post here: Choose your web fonts wisely
Social Media #ohsnap