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 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 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 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 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.
Posted in Web Design on Thursday, 23rd June 2011 at 2:55PM
This plugin for Expressionengine 2 returns the name of a user's browser based on PHP's HTTP_USER_AGENT variable.
Posted in Web Design on Thursday, 19th May 2011 at 8:03AM
Having decided to use HTML5 for my new portfolio site it made sense to embed the video on the homepage using the HTML5 video tag and on the whole I was fairly impressed with the results despite some flaky support even on the latest browsers. But as always I needed to bear the IE stragglers in mind and cater for them with a Flash fallback version of the video so having taken a quick look at a post entitled 'Video for every one' over at Camen Design I set to work wielding my object tag.
All went smoothly until I tried validating at which point I realised my pure unblemished code had been polluted. Now on the whole I'm not really a validation fascist and if there's a good reason why something won't validate, so be it, but this was different, this was the homepage of my web development portfolio site and my first foray into the HTML5 standard, something in me just kept saying 'make it validate'.
Posted in Web Design on Thursday, 24th February 2011 at 11:27AM
I usually use Cufon for my font embedding needs but if a font doesn’t want to be converted into Javascript or the resulting code is just too bloated for me to stomach then I find myself turning to @font-face, the css alternative.
I recently stumbled upon a brilliant tool for converting fonts to work across multiple platforms and to generate the @font-face code necessary to embed them. The site is called Font Squirrel and it converts the font to TTF, EOT, WOFF, SVG and AVGZ formats to ensure it works on as many platforms as possible. Whilst most decent browsers can deal directly with TTF fonts, poor old Internet Explorer needs the EOT (Embedded OpenType) format and IOS devices can only recognise SVG fonts. It also comes with various options for adjusting the way fonts are rendered. This makes using @font-face a breeze, at least it would if it wasn’t for the odd bug…
Posted in Web Design on Tuesday, 21st December 2010 at 5:08AM
Having built sites with most of the mainstream content management systems available today, both open source and commercial, I can say with confidence that Expressionengine has got to be my favourite thanks to its amazing flexibility and polished end user experience. Here are 10 add-ons and hacks that have helped me come to this conclusion.
Note (02/04/12): I have now released a new blog post with 10 more really useful add-ons at http://www.siblify.com/blog/ten_more_expressionengine_add_ons_and_some_usage_tips/
The Path to LiuGong
39.5 x 39.5 cm
Acrylics and Indian ink on canvas
