December 5, 2011 @ 1:54 pm | posted by jdf
Hello everyone! If you are a new visitor to the site, take some time to look around and, as always, please contact me if you have questions and especially if you need some work done.
I wanted to add an update since it has been so long. A lot of work this summer as well as a brief training internship for a local magazine made for an interesting few months. I have learned quite a bit and am anxious to get to work on a couple projects that are coming up.
First is 1099jobsportal.com. It is a site dedicated to helping people discover a short-term or long-term contract/1099 job. Please take a moment to check it out. WordPress is the foundation of this site and a great job search plugin allows for easy use and easy development. Something I was particularly excited about is the home page. I used a fair amount of CSS3 to design the hover image. First, the crowd fades and each captioned person becomes highlighted. Using the great :before and :after pseudo classes, I was able to add a caption to each hovered image with very little effort. One problem becomes clear though. Content residing within a stylesheet is never a particularly good thing but, in this case I think an exception can be made since the content with those pseudo classes does not need to be updated often, if at all.
I also learned that I can "nest" a pseudo class within a pseudo class. For instance, I only wanted my :before and :after pseudo classes to display when the mouse is hovered over a particular person. I had never tried this before but it worked quite well: an example .doctor:hover:before. I will have to add support for IE7 and below.
Second, is medairsystems.com. It has been a long time coming but I was commissioned to design and build the MAS website and inventory system. Using wordpress, I used the custom post type functions to create a robust inventory. This website will be up and running within the month. Stay tuned.
Speaking of IE, isn't it great that although its user numbers are relatively steady, more and more people are opting to use much better browser technology in Google Chrome and Firefox. STOP USING Internet Explorer 7! This is just an assumption on my part but, if you refuse to upgrade your browsing technology then your internet experience is suffering. There is another explosion of ideas coming through the use of HTML5 and CSS3 and Internet Explorer is stuck in the past. The purported beautiful internet that IE9 was to show its users is stagnate and based on old technology. A fair amount of CSS3 does not work in IE. Not only this but Internet Explorer has always made the dream of standards on the internet nearly impossible with its proprietary rendering engines and various other system flaws. IE is a bad browser no matter how much I want to like each new version.
Alright, that's all for this update.
August 19, 2011 @ 3:42 pm | posted by jdf
It seems there is some confusion about what exactly WordPress can do. WordPress is not only blogging software but is also a cms (content management system). It can be customized in almost every way. There is a difference between wordpress.com (the wordpress hosted blog) and wordpress.org (the self hosted wordpress installation option). The latter is one of the best cms applications I have ever used. WordPress can handle high traffic and is adept at avoiding spam (within the right hands).
I know some of you will say "...but I don't want a blog." Well, that is the point. WordPress can be a blog but it can also be so much more. In fact, if you do not want a blog (posts/comments), that part can be left off of your site completely. WordPress plugins/functions are easy to create. This means that you can have an easily updated inventory or a database of photography and videos. The possibilities are almost endless.
For instance, I am working on a site that I chose to compile in wordpress. It is not a blog, it is a product inventory/description site. I began developing a custom cms program for this client but was not happy with the process of development. Rather than reinvent the wheel, wordpress was there to show me its ease of use.
WordPress is literally thousands of lines of code and is a beast that has become more and more domesticated over the past 8 years or so. Sites built using wordpress as their back-end are very popular. In fact, wordpress is one of the most popular content management systems in the world. It is easily configurable. It is easy to customize and your current design can be adapted to fit around the skeleton that it provides. So, for those less inclined to start-up a blog, allow me to recommend wordpress. For those who wish to start-up a blog, try wordpress.
I can design you a wonderful site using wordpress as the glue that binds it all together as well as update your current wordpress installation/design. If you need assistance with wordpress, I can help you! Post a comment or Drop me a line.
August 15, 2011 @ 11:14 am | posted by jdf
In a whirlwind I analyzed the design and applied the final touch-ups. This is just an update to the previous post. I wanted to go over what I did and why.
I shrunk the layout to 960px and floated it to the center. The 100% width was killing me. This layout, compared to the previous, breaths with white space. I also changed the iphone4 texture background to a light-burst type background, emphasizing the new logo and doing away with what I felt was a generic reuse of that background. I did not realize it when I first posted the new design but, it is overused.
The navigation is the bright spot for me. I am still utilizing CSS3 transitions to animate them. In this case they raise and lower when hovered over. I created a background for each button. It is very similar to the noise and gradient I applied to the new logo. Red seemed like a good choice for active page link colors. In fact, I decided to spread the red around in an attempt to distance myself from the overuse of azul.
The blog page has changed quite a bit. The same post-box template is still in use but I resized it and added the sidebar. I am particularly proud of the use of CSS border combined with the CSS3 border-radius elements.
The footer gave me a lot of problems because of very bad mistake on my part and not clearing the floats to pull the content holder down. For hours I sat yelling at the screen. After a humbling moment of realizing how foolish I had been I discovered a simple answer to my problem. CSS 101. All it took... br style="clear:both". Silly me.
I have begun an effort to organize and consolidate my stylesheets. Big things, big things. Calling multiple classes per div has also helped.
I am planning more work on the homepage and general content layout. It is rather dull at the moment. More JQuery has been prescribed!
As always, I am here if you need any help with web related questions.
July 28, 2011 @ 8:30 am | posted by jdf
As you may (or may not) notice, I have posted a brand new design. This is a lot cleaner and I think expresses more of a professional tone. Along with this, it is more interactive than ever. I have used wordpress for this build and plan on using it quite a bit more. WordPress is very intuitive and it has taught me a lot.
I decided to go with the gray background. I know many of you have probably seen this pattern around the internet. It has become increasingly popular. I will most likely change it out soon but, for now I think it suits the page. I also designed a new logo that I may touch up. I used Fireworks and Dreamweaver exclusively for this project.
I plan on adding a nice JQuery slider to the portfolio section and make that a bit nicer to look at.
I used a lot of CSS3 here and am really excited about the progression of what has already proven to be an amazing new tool. There is extensive use of box-shadow, text-shadow and border-radius. For the navigation at the top of the page I, instead of opting for JQuery (which I might still switch back to), chose the CSS3 route. CSS3 transitions are very easy to use and will be in heavy use very soon. I have not forgotten the old browsers but have begun to care less and less about IE6. IE7+ should really be the standard these days.
This design is mostly elastic. It has a minimum width of 800px. The site will support mobile devices in the coming week or so cutting down the max width on those devices to 640px.
My recommendation to you is to stop being timid about your use of CSS3. Enjoy it. It is an amazing tool that simplifies so much about creating websites. It has its drawbacks, but falls back quite well with older browsers. That is, of course, if you are keeping that in mind with your general layout. For instance, this site looks how I want it to on older browsers. The shadows and rounded edges do not show up but, in my mind those things are reserved for better technology. Creating images that do the things that CSS3 does in two lines of code will make your life easier in the long run.
I know there are many that will disagree but, they're probably holding on to other things from the past as well.
June 20, 2011 @ 10:38 pm | posted by jdf
I just finished work on uwcampaign.org for United Way Toledo. The old site needed to be reorganized and streamlined. I also spruced up the 'steps to...' area. Take a look.
And, thanks Nate.