Website Design Tips & Tricks

New domains on their way!

2011-06-20T04:47:00.000-07:00

The Internet's primary governing body today approved the expansion of new top-level domains--one of the most dramatic changes in the Internet's history.
During a special meeting in Singapore, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to dramatically increase the number of domain endings from the current 22, which includes the well-established .com, .net, and .org. The move will allow domains to end in almost any word, allowing companies to turn their brands into Internet extensions.

"ICANN has opened the Internet's naming system to unleash the global human imagination," Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive officer of ICANN, said in a statement. "Today's decision respects the rights of groups to create new Top Level Domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind."

Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN's board of directors, said the "decision will usher in a new Internet age. We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration."

ICANN said it would soon begin a global campaign to educate people about the changes and opportunities they afford. Applications for new generic top-level domains will be accepted from January 12, 2012, to April 12, 2012, and the estimated evaluation fee is $185,000. (Click here to see ICANN's fact sheet on the new GTLDs (PDF).)

Hundreds of applications for these suffixes are expected, including .car, .love, .movie, .web, and .gay.

The battle over new top-level domains has been long and often contentious. Earlier this year, a rift developed between national governments and the nonprofit organization over how much influence government officials, and to a lesser extent trademark owners, will enjoy over the process of creating new domain suffixes.
Also, a U.S. proposal that would have given it and other governments the power to veto future top-level domain names failed to win approval. A group of nations rejected the proposal, concluding instead that governments can offer nonbinding "advice" about controversial suffixes but would not receive actual veto power. Proposed domain suffixes like .gay are likely to prove contentious among more conservative nations

Joys of Joomla!

2011-03-09T06:10:00.000-08:00

So as I blogged in the past, I wanted to use Joomla! for future projects to give my clients more flexibility with their websites and give them that extra edge on their competitors by updating their website with the click of a button and without lengthy and costly intervention.

I'm inherently lazy, and so I find are most of the IT professionals - that's why we're in IT. We make shortcuts all day every day, making things to make our lives easier and simpler in the future. Though I'm sure I'm not the first to realise we're not getting there as fast as we'd like!

So, for my latest project I've decided to use Joomla! At first it seemed quite daunting with all the different configuration options, along with the talk of modules and plugins which I had nightmares about being really difficult to understand the concept. After a morning of playing and tinkering, I ended up with a working site as well as a customised template all of my own. OK, it wasn't very pretty, but the concepts there and I'm happy I could build something customised for a client within a reasonable timeframe.

The great thing I've found, which I was sceptical on at first, is that you can create a simple HTML/CSS site to start with as your template then add in all the Joomla! stuff afterwards. Plug in all the modules and content areas you want, and with a little more CSS tinkering you've got a pretty decent site.

My thanks to Norm at Teaching Joomla! for his expertise in getting me started.

Go on, give Joomla! a go

Social media for your business

2011-01-29T11:12:00.000-08:00

In a world full of Facebook and Twitter social networking it's only natural that businesses want to get in on the action and promote their business. But it's a fine line between informative reading and updates to your "followers" to full-out spamming and quickly giving yourself a bad name.

The terms “Social media,” “Web 2.0,” “Twitter” and “Facebook” are saturating the media, and clogging our spam filters. How many emails or ads have you seen that said something like “Millions of people use Facebook every day. Don’t miss out on the advertising opportunity and get left behind?” In fact I regularly get inquiry from clients asking whether or not they should be on Facebook or Twitter.
The basic strategy for marketing using social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, is to build an appropriate network of fellow users. Once you have that network setup you can post messages that will show up on the homepage of all those you are linked to. This can drive traffic to your main website, build your reputation, or just spread the word about your business.

For example an estate agent could post something like “I have a 4bdrm house in London for 500K” and then have a link to the listing on their website. You’d assume people following an estate agent would be looking for a house, so that’s a convenient way of getting the word out for listings, and driving traffic to the main website.

The use for promoting professional services is a little less straightforward. If you just spam your contacts with business promotion, it isn't going to be long before you are unfriended. The use for this type of business is generally going to be creating Tweets on Twitter or posts on Facebook that point to a blog article. That blog article would need to contain useful information and then cross-sell your services. The Twitter stream could be posted automatically to Facebook, or you could create a similar Facebook posting manually, or you could included the blog’s RSS feed in your Facebook account. Which way you use will depend on how much control you want over the individual postings.
If you are selling products, again you would need to write some kind of useful content on a blog, and then cross-sell your product on the article page.
The utility of using Facebook or Twitter to promote most businesses is overemphasized, primarily by SEOs or marketers who see it as a new angle to get some money from unsuspecting business people. The media hype surrounding Twitter and Facebook makes their proposals seem plausible, but in the end, it can end up being a big waste of time.

What CMS?

2010-10-21T02:35:00.000-07:00

Throughout my website development for new clients, more and more are asking for a CMS solution of sorts which will allow them to update the content to the webpages themselves. Fair enough in my opinion, it works in two ways - firstly my clients get to update their website free of charge without having to pay me; and secondly it means I don't have to get bombard every two weeks to do the tedious work of updating sentences throughout their pages.

So, I started looking for a simple solution to get things rolling. The lastest website I built was for a new start-up company Ekland - Solar Panel Specialists in Devon which required a CMS solution. Here's what I found:

Cushy CMS www.cushycms.com/
A clean, intuitive, and friendly website that allows you to update your website effortlessly using their online app. Just add their class name to the div's or sections you want to be editable and bingo! edit away. Only slight concern I had with this website was that you had to store your FTP details with them for your users to be able to come back later and update the content - something that I didn't feel comfortable in doing unfortunately - especially as it says that any hacking of user information to obtain the FTP details is not their fault.....

KompoZer www.kompozer.net/
Played around with this for about an hour and found this to be a really good bit of kit. Ok, looking a little dated now that we're all on Windows 7, but the functionality is there. Download the application, connect to your FTP and you're away. You can easily open the HTML files in a visual editor which makes it very easy to see what you're editing. Plus there is a HTML view; which I feel will become useful if I ever have to debug what a client has done wrong.

Joomla
And finally, Joomla! It's an obvious solution these days - lots of templates out there and apparently easy to edit/update. By modularising the components (header/footer) you only have to change the module itself for the changes to be reflected across all pages of your website. In my latest project I unfortunately didn't have time to sit down and learn how Joomla works, but for my next project I will certainly be doing so.

In summary, for a simple WYSIWYG editor that you can trust (he says shly) I'd use KompoZer; but moving forward - if you can spare the time to learn how Joomla works it's going to pay dividends. I've created my own custom CMS packages for clients before in .NET - never again I feel!!

2010-10-01T02:18:00.000-07:00

Hello one and all! Apologies for such a delay in posts, work has been hectic of late. Just pushed out two websites in the past month, and currently beavering away at another for a new Solar PV Installation company - exciting stuff!!

Although it's all good fun creating new websites for people all the time, I think it's necessary to sometimes take stock and adjust your work-social balance. I've got a full-time 9-5 job as a software developer, and work doing freelance website development in Exeter in my free time. This said, boundaries often blur in terms of having some time off. Yesterday for example, I worked 9am - 6:30pm at work, got home, made my girlfriend dinner, then worked from 8pm-11:30pm; a little too much I'd hope you'd agree.

If I'm not careful this is an on-going process for me, and I'll work 4 hours a night every night of the week - and crash on the weekends wanting to do nothing but sleep. So today, I've taken stock and decided to put in place a little routine for forthcoming projects - maximum 2 evenings a week freelance development time, maximum 3hours at a time. I love to be able to get back to customers asap, and deliver results before they've even finished their question but I think now that I've built an established client base that trusts me they'd be happy to wait a few days for the work to be done - surely!!

Anyway, my 2 cents - make sure you don't burn the candle at both ends. Doing freelance work should be an enjoyable alternative to the real grind. Don't make the mistake of making it your life and turning you into a working bore.

Ta, ta!

Background Patterns & Textures for your website

2010-08-25T02:06:00.000-07:00

I was thinking the other day, when creating a mock-up website for a client, wouldn't it be good if there was a resource to get background images for your webpages. Why this question hadn't occured to me before I don't know, but generally I make websites with quite a simple background - a gradiented gif or some such. I've always thought it best to have something small which can be repeated rather than try and make the client render a huge image.

Well needless to say, I quickly managed to find some great resources for background images. My top 3 are:

Brusheezy
Visit Website

Everyday Icons
Visit Website

Alice Grafixx
Visit Website

Check out the website I created for Lauren Hagger - an artist based in the Devon. For this website I used one of these free background images.

i-Pads, Shy-Pads

2010-08-13T02:45:00.000-07:00

So, this week I was blessed with winning a website designing competition at my company, the prize - an iPad! Truth be told, from a company of nearly 2000 employees - there weren't a huge number of entries as not everyone had the technological know-how to create a website.

Even so, I'd still like to think my design, concept and it's user-friendliness got me to the top. From the knowledge I've picked up over the past year when building freelance websites for companies; I defnitely feel more confident at delivering high quality designs and interfaces that not only satisfies the client but more importantly I'm proud to make. Don't get me wrong though...I'm not arrogant in what I do, and I'm far from where I want to be as a web guru.

Anyway, we're going off topic - what I wanted to write about was this darn iPad. Many people have commented that for all the time I spend creating websites and working on software programming, I'm not the gadgety type - I just don't understand it! I'm happy to play with a gadget for an hour, but soon enough will get bored and if it's not useful I don't want it, odd it may be.

I had a play with the iPad last night; it's beautiful, sleek, clean, quick, clever....but what does it do?! So far, I've watched YouTube a lot, and played with Google Maps...just for the resizing and panning fun you can have with it. Now I'm at a loss....I recently got my holy grail Android phone which I can't leave alone as I can access the internet, email, facebook, AND phone people; the iPad just seems a bigger and more cumbersome version of this...without phoning (though to be honest, I'm not sure I'd want to make a phone call on it!)

Maybe some can enlighten me on what I'm missing, don't get me wrong - I like it, just don't know what to do with it!!

For the love of jQuery!

2010-08-04T03:57:00.000-07:00

I've been developing websites for the past 8 years; both for big companies around the UK and US as well as smaller companies in Exeter, UK. There's nothing more exciting when creating websites than to get to grips with some really flashy UI's that will plug-and-play but also allow you to delve deep into the underlying code and modify it to your needs.

I appreciate jQuery has been around for over 4 years now, and I'm far too late to express this as a new-found technology that you must have - but it's still worth talking about as it's popularity and ease of use in my opinion is snowballing.

As a freelance website designer in Exeter, there's nothing better when brainstorming with new and existing clients than being able to show them something flashy, quickly and uncomplicated to give them that all important vision of where we can go with their website.

Generally I start with a standard jQuery plugin and as the functionality dictates I then take a look under the hood to customise it as required. Have a look at my portfolio page of websites; a number of which use customised jQuery plugins to create cool image galleries and UI's. Check out The Paper Florist's website to see how to customise the 'Simple Controls Image Gallery' to be combined with the jQuery Lightbox - simple yet surprisingly effective!

Why aren't I using this fantabulous technology already, I hear you ask!? Simple answer: I really don't know. It's lightweight, cross-browser compatible, powerful, UI rich and most of all: easy to bend to your needs.

So....next time you start messing around with images, navigation or anything clientside on a website, take a sneak at jQuery and code with a smile!

About me:

If you're interested, feel free to contact me about website design; or have a browse through my website and portfolio to see how jQuery's changed my life.