Site Icons

28th February, 2008

One of my latest tasks is to produce 48 icons for a CMS interface!

Ocean Addict Website

20th February, 2008

I am currently working on the Ocean Addict website now alongside several other projects, for which we have decided to use WordPress as a form of CMS and integrate it with other features such as e-commerce software, a gallery and a forum.

Here is a preview of my current direction of design…

Website Design Inspiration

12th February, 2008

Because it is becoming a common occurence that I find a website that I find particularly inspirational, whether that be for its graphical design or a particular way of structuring what would normally be a very ordinary feature, and never really noting down the URL.

Now I could tag these sites using del.icio.us under something like ‘inspiration’ but I think I would rather also have more specific information or notes and possibly a screenshot to add some context.

So I shall be recording these websites on a page here.

FRED website

4th January, 2008

An opportunity to work on a flash based website came up shortly before christmas where the company previously named ‘Uncle Fred’ had rebranded themselves to simply FRED and wanted their site updated to reflect these changes. Their website can be found at http://www.fredstalent.com.

The updated version is currently being tested at http://www.srjm.co.uk/FRED/

Update: No longer being developed in the test location (Link redirects to this post).

Why does IE get PNG images quite so wrong?

26th November, 2007

Now I have avoided using transparent PNG for a long time despite its various advantages such as having a real alpha channel that can produce smooth, anti-aliased edges and having a proper amount of colours instead of 256, mainly because of IE6. But I have been testing for IE7 for a while now and I knew the issue of PNGs and the handling of their transparency is supposed to be fixed so I reasoned that I could design with PNG transparency in mind and worry about fixing it for IE6 later.

Read the rest of this entry »

Flash and Javascript

31st October, 2007

The next plan was to enable the flash in my new design’s header to change the dimensions of the div it was sat in so that for most the time it takes up less room, but when it needs it the space expands to allow for larger content there. I had already anticipated doing something like this so had included the mootools JS library at the very start of building my new design.

http://www.broken-links.com/2007/05/01/a-mootools-quickstart-guide/

Creating breadcrumb links

27th October, 2007

I decided that I would like to create a breadcrumb links bar for the top section of each page of my new website design. A google search brought many many differing ways of achieving this using PHP however none of them seemed to concisely achieve what I needed. So instead I used a few of the most useful examples as a reference and created my own. The following are a good place to start I found, especially the first listed here (although last one I found):

http://www.sillybean.net/archives/452

http://www.zend.com/zend/spotlight/breadcrumb28.php

http://gr0w.com/articles/code/php_breadcrumb_links_creator/

Next comes the CSS for that general area, including my new design’s main navigation.

Site Maintenance & Error Pages

24th October, 2007

Whilst I have been deleting the unnesessary, old and forgotten files scattered on my website I have decided to look into creating my own error pages. I am always being warned when something goes wrong that error pages could not be found to handle the error, and now I am removing lots of files maybe they will be needed more than ever.

The 404 error is especially noticeable when you are producing a new PHP script to display links to the latest posts on your website.

So in order to create these pages, I’ve had to quickly learn a little bit of SSI or ‘Server Side Includes’ from Apache because I am unable to change the name or type of file used to handle the errors on my server to PHP.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html – all the reference I would need on SSI.