Posted in Web Design on Tuesday, 20th March 2012 at 5:10AM
It's been a year and a half since writing 'My top 10 ExpressionEngine addons' and there have been loads of exciting new add-ons released in that time, so I thought it was time to write a follow-up post to pick out 10 more of my favourites and give a few examples of how I might use them.
Posted in The Good Life on Sunday, 18th March 2012 at 2:40PM
Spring is in the air and I have recently been faced with an unusual dilema. Having just moved house we wanted to plant a few fruit trees in quite an irregular shaped garden with numerous potential obstacles between the ground and the sun and I couldn't work where each tree would be best situated to gain maximum sunlight throughout the summer. Having pondered various locations and even planted a couple of the trees I had a flash of inspiration that gave me the precise sunlight hours for any spot of the garden at any point in time.
Posted in Web Design on Thursday, 19th January 2012 at 4:27PM
Headings with background colours are a common design element of modern websites. Because headings are displayed as block by default, they will by nature stretch to fill the full available width of their containing element which is fine until you want them to have a background which only sits below the text and not the full width of the parent element. You may be able to use set widths to achieve something similar but this doesn't account for scaling text sizes or content generated by a client via their CMS which can change frequently.
In an ideal world the 'inline-block' declaration should cater for these eventualities by providing the styling capabilities of a block level element such as padding and margins, but with the 'expand-with-content' property of inline elements. Unfortunately, support for this property is patchy and unreliable on a lot of commonly used browsers but I came across this snippet of CSS which gets all browsers from IE6 onwards to behave - and it works like a charm every time.
Posted in Freelancing on Tuesday, 10th January 2012 at 9:59AM
Web designer and developer, Michael Sibley (AKA Siblify) is on the move. Having promised myself that I would take full advantage of the mobility that the freelancing lifestyle has to offer, I am relocating southwards, from Gloucestershire to sunny Dorset.
My passion is for creating a superior web experience, not just for end-users but also for site administrators through meticulous design and a keen awareness of usability. I want people to feel empowered to edit and update their websites so I base all my sites around ExpressionEngine, a fully featured and highly flexible Content Management System or CMS, to make changing the content really easy without compromising design or functionality.
Posted in Web Design on Tuesday, 10th January 2012 at 9:05AM
I count myself as being fairly proficient with Photoshop but at the same time I am sure there are a lot of very basic techniques that I am unaware of and until recently this was one of them. Whilst there are a few different ways to achieve HTML curved corners for your website including javascript methods and CSS3, for those clients who insist that their site looks identical in every browser the only reliable solution is to use 2 background images on an outer and inner element.
Posted in Freelancing on Tuesday, 27th September 2011 at 1:11PM
I recently wrote an article entitled 'Agency vs Freelancer. Choosing the right person(s) for your new website' which compared the pros and cons of using either an agency or freelancer to build your new website. In this article I want to examine in greater depth some of the qualities to look for when hiring a freelance web designer. Finding a suitable freelancer can be a bit of a minefield so it really is worth taking careful consideration when trying to select the right person for the job.
When using a solo freelancer it would unrealistic to expect them to be an expert in every area of the web development process but you should ensure they are competent (if not exceptional) at the core skills needed to get your website from initial proposal through to sign off and launch.
Posted in Web Design on Tuesday, 27th September 2011 at 10:40AM
My most recent project included the need for an interactive map in which countries covered by the company commisioning the website, would be highlighted on mouse-over. The map also needed to display the current local time for the capital of the active country.
For several years my first port of call for a project such as this would have been Flash, but this is no longer the case thanks to tools such as the jQuery javascript library and its wealth of community built plugins which makes coding these sorts of things relatively straight forward whilst negating the need for browser plugins. Creating the graphics for each country and positioning them correctly was fiddly and time consuming but the actual coding was fairly simple.
Posted in Web Design on Wednesday, 3rd August 2011 at 10:02AM
Being a freelancer that has worked closely with agencies in the past I find it interesting what makes people choose one option over the other. They both produce a similar product but come at it from a different angle and often with varying results. Before deciding who is best suited for any particular project there are a few things I would recommend thinking about to ensure you get the right person for the job at the right price.
Without the overheads that larger business' inevitably incur, freelance web developers are often able to keep their rates relatively low. There's only one salary to pay, no premises to rent and no shareholders to demand that profits continue to build year on year. In my experience, sites that I have built on behalf of agencies have been charged out at 2-3 times the figure I would have demanded as a freelancer.
Posted in Art on Tuesday, 19th July 2011 at 7:50AM
The last 12 months have been hectic thanks to a combination of high web demand and new babies which has resulted in some very slow progress on the painting fron but finally I have something new to show - View over Macau.
This painting was made using cotton and ink on raw canvas and was based on a view overlooking the Chinese special administrative region of Macau. A short walk from bright lights and casinos of down-town Macau is a more gritty, less glitzy city, which provided an irresistable backdrop for this rather dark and foreboding painting. Buildings are stacked in a haphazard almost accidental fashion with numerous wires and washing lines acting as linkages between the spaces people live in.
Posted in Web Design on Wednesday, 13th July 2011 at 1:11PM
It's always good to find a resource offering good quality learning material about ExpressionEngine so I thought I'd mention a newly launched site that does just that, EE Spotlight. EE Spotlight was set up by Ryan Battles of Jovia Web Studio to provide a platform for ExpressioneEngine developers to share their knowledge and experiences of ExpressionEngine with each other. It also hosts regular updates from Ryan himself on the latest EE news and add-ons.
Here's how Ryan describes EE Spotlight:
"My vision for EE Spotlight is that it will be a repository for knowledge and community interaction. I also wanted to make it an easily available tool for others to post their content onto, passing along some search engine optimization back towards their own agency or freelance site."
I came first encountered EE Spotlight thanks to a request from Ryan for me to post an article on HTML email platform integration with ExpressionEngine. You can read the post at http://ee-spotlight.com/tutorials/integrating_html_emails_with_expressionengine.
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Blizzard (Hauser Kaibling)
40cm x 30cm
Acrylics and Indian ink on canvas
