Webdesigninformer.com

Cameron Moll Go to the source

I have a confession to make: I don’t like paying full price for Apple hardware. So I buy it refurbished . Almost all of it. In fact, in the past few years I’ve purchased a 20″ iMac, 13″ black MacBook, Mac Mini, Airport, and now a 13″ MacBook Pro 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (aluminum unibody) — all refurbished. The obvious advantage to buying refurbished over paying full retail is exactly that — you typically save anywhere from 10% to 30%, and all products are covered by a one-year warranty. I’ve hardly needed the warranty… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

dConstruct week is in full swing. The conference itself is tomorrow. Remy and Brian are doing their workshops today. Myself, Rich and Nat did our HTML5 and CSS3 Wizardry workshop yesterday. I was handling the HTML5 side of things and had quite a bit of fun with it. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I can never pinpoint the exact moment at which I “get into” a particular technology. CSS, DOM Scripting, microformats …there was never any Damascene conversion to any of them. Instead, I’d just notice one day, after gradually using the technology more and more, that I was immersed in it. That’s how I feel about HTML5 now. There’s another feeling that accompanies this realisation. I remember feeling it about CSS in the late 90s and about DOM Scripting half a decade ago. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

I know, this feels like a Facebook meme or something like that. But in the absence of having time to post something more substantial, this will have to do. I go in for knee surgery tomorrow, hence a large part of the reason things have been relatively silent around here. This is due to a severe injury playing soccer (football) and several weeks of physical therapy since, consuming a lot of my spare time. This will be surgery #5 for me, the continuation of a history of knee problems since I was 16. The most ridiculous injury so far… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

HTML5 is a strange character with what appears to be a split personality. Hardly surprising then that something so divided would appear to be so divisive. First of all, there’s the spec itself. The specification HTML5 walks a fine line between maintaining backward compatibility with existing markup and forging the way as a modern, updated specification for the future. If it strays too far in paving the cowpaths and simply codifies what authors already publish, then the spec would mandate using table s for layout and font elements for presentation because that’s still what most of the web does. On the other hand, if it drifts too far in the other direction, the result will be something as theoretically pure but as practically useless as XHTML2 . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

HTML5 is a strange character with what appears to be a split personality. Hardly surprising then that something so divided would appear to be so divisive. First of all, there’s the spec itself. The specification HTML5 walks a fine line between maintaining backward compatibility with existing markup and forging the way as a modern, updated specification for the future. If it strays too far in paving the cowpaths and simply codifies what authors already publish, then the spec would mandate using table s for layout and font elements for presentation because that’s still what most of the web does. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

Somebody contacts you out of the blue, possibly through a friend or from an advert you posted on a dating site, interested in meeting up for a drink and possibly more. They like what they’ve seen so far, but before telling you about themselves, they want a little more information. It’s noting big and perfectly normal. They just want a copy of your passport, your last quarter bank statement and the phone numbers of your past couple of dates. Oh, and could you sign this contract agreeing with my standard date conditions assuming I chose to go out with you… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

Somebody contacts you out of the blue, possibly through a friend or from an advert you posted on a dating site, interested in meeting up for a drink and possibly more. They like what they’ve seen so far, but before telling you about themselves, they want a little more information. It’s noting big and perfectly normal. They just want a copy of your passport, your last quarter bank statement and the phone numbers of your past couple of dates. Oh, and could you sign this contract agreeing with my standard date conditions assuming I chose to go out with you. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

I thought I had Adobe’s colour profiles all worked out. I really did. I’m sure they’re great for photographers and print designers and so on. The problem is, on the web, we deal with browsers and image formats that don’t support colour profiles. With a few exceptions, we can’t use them even if we want to. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

The rule of thirds and ratios such as the golden section are fantastic methods for achieving designs that feel cohesive. The problem is these principles don’t really apply to web design. Golden Ratio: When the ratio between two numbers is the same as the ratio of the sum of those numbers and the larger number. Basically, a+b is to a as a is to b . Also referred to as the “divine proportion” from its frequent occurrence in nature. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

With all the talk of URL shortening services, I decided to add a quick service into Snook.ca, which is run on CakePHP, to redirect a short URL to a post. Because my static content already has short URLs and all I have are posts, creating a short URL handler for it was very easy. To give you some context, I route my posts through a specific structure: /archives/:category /archives/:category/:articlename In this case, I have a couple routes that route everything to my Posts controller and the bycat or view actions. These action take the named parameters and pulls out the appropriate content. Easy peasy. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

I recently received a wireframe from a potential client outlining their plans for a new homepage, which in itself was pretty impressive. It showed that the client had knowledge of the industry as well as a good understanding about the importance of planning. To produce this wireframe our prospective client had used a relatively new tool called Balsamiq, which aims to capture the sketchy nature of hand drawn wireframes with the utility of a GUI application. On the surface this seems like a really good idea and it obviously allowed the client to produce something relatively quickly with little or no prior experience. As such, I think a tool like Balsamiq does have a place in the non-professional market… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

At last—at long, long last!— the results of the A List Apart Survey 2008 are available , along with the anonymized raw data we collected. There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door. A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings). I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise. They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

I don’t talk about personal stuff around these parts very often (for that, you can tune into my Twitter feed ) but the time has come again to share a little news — and for those that do follow me on Twitter, this will all be very familiar. As some of you may know, my wife and I have two children that have come to us through adoption. Both were adopted at birth. Both were adopted from the States. The first from Utah and the second from Kansas. Both have been incredible journeys and we’ve been incredibly blessed to have two rambunctious little boys in our lives… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

While I’ve known of Yahoo Pipes for awhile, I never really thought to use it until now. Pipes is a neat tool that Yahoo has put together to allow you to mashup feeds, filter feeds and create a completely new feed. Commonly, I’ve seen people take feeds from a number of different sources on a particular subject and combine them into a master feed. For example, they want a master CakePHP feed but want to grab only posts that actually mention CakePHP. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

A lot of companies make money by driving traffic to their sites through marketing or SEO campaigns in the hope that some of their visitors will turn into customers. This makes sense when attention is plentiful and online marketing is cheap. However as marketing costs rise and attention becomes increasingly scarce, companies need to look outside of the traditional marketing funnel. Rather than simply increasing traffic, companies need to start focussing on conversions. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

A lot of companies make money by driving traffic to their sites through marketing or SEO campaigns in the hope that some of their visitors will turn into customers. This makes sense when attention is plentiful and online marketing is cheap. However as marketing costs rise and attention becomes increasingly scarce, companies need to look outside of the traditional marketing funnel. Rather than simply increasing traffic, companies need to start focussing on conversions. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) Not surprisingly, there was a lot of community feedback asking for better layout mechanisms . Actually, people were asking for any decent layout mechanism at all, which CSS has historically lacked. Floats mostly work, but they’re a hack and can be annoyingly fragile even when you ignore old-browser bugs. Positioning works in limited cases, but does not handle web-oriented layout at all well. Why do we use floats for layout, anyway? clear . … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

View from on stage as I’m preparing to speak at An Event Apart New Orleans 2008. I’ll be straight up with you: I don’t profess to be an expert speaker. I’ve had my share of presentations that have been total flops, along with some very successful ones. But if anything, I’ve done quite a bit of speaking over the past four years (see the summary on my LinkedIn public profile ), and therefore I’ve learned a few things about speaking along the way. Below are 20 things I’ve learned. Though this list is geared towards one-hour sessions rather than panels and workshops, some of the same principles apply… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

The traditional approach to product development involves coming up with new idea and then driving as many people towards that product as possible, in the hope that some of them will want it. As such we adopt the language of marketing, and talk about marketing funnels and conversion rates. If our marketing department has done a good job they will have created a campaign that not only generates traffic, but creates a previously unrecognised need. Tired? Need a break? Why not have a KitKat? … Read the rest here