For the next week, Ill be making my annual pilgrimage to Austin, TX for the South by Southwest Interactive conference. This week of panels and networking is a yearly renewal of my passion for great design and reaffirmation that I want to (continue to try to) be a great web designer. To find me in [...]
Sort form: No direct way, use a third party tool. Long form: Since MySpace (finally) opened its API, there are applications being created with the intent to sync it up with Twitter, but they havent gotten it right yet. Min Tweets, MiniTweet and Tweet! are all applications that display within your MySpace page, but do [...]
When I downloaded and installed the All-in-One SEO plug-in for WordPress and it didn’t work quite right. The new <meta> tags were being displayed, but the <title> had not changed from the WordPress default setting. The reason was the tag <php wp-head()> was in the wrong place. The All-in-One SEO plug-in interacts with the page [...]
I go to get a haircut and explain the cut I am looking for, she responds ask the following questions: Would you like your hair shampooed? Would you like the scissors or the razor? If the razor, what settings do you want? A 2? Maybe a 3? I just looked at her perplexed and wondered [...]
Adobe is killing off GoLive. This is a somber day for me, because while I have not used GoLive in years, it was integral in my development into a professional web designer. All through college, my only means of HTML coding was hand-coding within a UNIX session. Just as I was graduating, the University purchased [...]
No, not like that, it’s CSS Naked Day, the day to dive under the hood of your website, rip out the stylesheet and see if your content is still accessible. If you have a W3C valid site, then chances are really good you’ve designed the site well enough that it could live without the branding [...]
When you are freelance designing, the soundest approach is typically to charge an hourly rate. The better you are, the more you charge per hour for your work, it’s an increasing scale. But what happens when you are competent enough to no longer need many hours to complete the work? I went to the National [...]
Anyone who designs emails knows that the current landscape of compatibility and rendering from the many different email clients makes the Netscape/IE browser wars of the late 90s look like a sandbox skirmish. Many of us have come to terms with having to continue to use antiquated <font> and <table> based HTML to get a [...]
Spec. documents are faulty, they are often too cumbersome to read (let alone write). They dive into such specifics that the developer may assume that all the details is addressed. That’s when pragmatic thinking and common sense are taken out of the equation.The preferred method is to tell the development team a story; a very [...]
I am working on trying to get the father-in-law-to-be’s brick and morter store online. I have a site design put together, and because it’s a competitive industry, it needs to be good to get any hope of attention. Here’s my issue. I need a shopping cart, and most of the ones I see are either [...]
