Web 2.0
June 12th, 2009
Web 2.0 is the one-millionth word in the English dictionary!
Done with School!!!
June 7th, 2009
I just completed all of my requirements for the Web Programming Certificate at MATC and I’ll be picking the certificate up on Monday. I’m ecstatic to be done with school after 5 years, over 160 credits of undergrad followed by a year of working full time and taking evening/online classes at MATC. There’s still plenty for me to learn but I think I’ll be learning from books on my own time from now on because I want to know what it’s like to actually have free time. Grad school isn’t completely out of the question, but I’d like to be clear of undergrad debt and have a really, really clear idea of what to study before I would get a Master’s degree. I think a Master’s is in order if I ever want to be a webmaster or web manager for a career, but just being a web developer is good enough for me right now.
Designing in Milwaukee
May 27th, 2009
So, even though I’ve really only been designing/developing for about a year I’m already starting to wonder how this career in Milwaukee compares to the same career in other cities. I already know how the weather here compares, sigh.
One big problem I notice is that Chicago is so close and man are there some real powerhouses of design and development there. This really only matters for medium to large projects as most small projects stay local anyway, but I often wonder how Milwaukee web design firms do any business considering that Chicago based companies usually even come before Milwaukee companies in searches with words like web design, Milwaukee, southeast Wisconsin, etc.
One great thing I see in Milwaukee is that it is a relatively artsy city. UWM has an extraordinarily high number of art and graphic design students, and just on the other side of downtown is the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. MSOE and MATC both teach tons of courses in programming and design fundamentals, so this city has more than enough resources and talent to train an army of web designers/developers.
Milwaukee seems to have a ton of small business owners which is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand there are tons of people who need websites for their businesses, but on the other hand, most small business owners seem to be incredibly busy and have little income to throw towards a web project.
All in all, I suppose Milwaukee is a fair city in which to be a web designer/developer, though I may just be seeing greener grass other places.
Redesigning
May 3rd, 2009
This weekend I finished most of the work on the redesign of my techno band’s website. The site now features a cool abstract background, an improved audio player, and a lot of jQuery effects to drive the interface. I’m pretty excited for it to go live… though the server which hosts the production site has been down all weekend 🙁 I guess that’s what happens with free server space sometimes.
eCommerce
April 27th, 2009
eCommerce has pretty much been the bane of my web development existence since I really got started making sites. The problem is mostly that EVERYBODY wants to sell stuff online without realizing any of the costs or work that go into. I think a lot of people assume that online shops come at little no cost and then are just floored when I quote a price above $1000 for design, CMS, and eCommerce. In reality, $1000 is a joke of a price but it’s enough to dissuade many people. Clearly, those who give up on their store aspirations after hearing a 1k price tag were never serious in the first place- could you even imagine expecting to start any other serious business with less than $1000?
The real problem is that with each eCommerce job I don’t do I feel like I’m falling farther and farther behind, which is never good in the high speed world of web design. Are there any designers/developers out there who know of some foolproof, low cost eCommerce systems that can convince clients that spending some money is actually worth it?
More handy links
April 11th, 2009
A very nice looking design gallery:
http://csscreme.com/
A gorgeous shopping cart system
http://bigcartel.com/
Just about every programming book you could ever want online, FREE!
http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/
jQuery
April 5th, 2009
I just started teaching myself jQuery about 3 weeks ago and it’s already slipped into just about every single project I’ve done since. My thoughts on this popular library are…
jQuery is AWESOME!
That is all.
Fighting for CSS
March 28th, 2009
It seems that now, the year 2009, in the world of Web 2.0, over 10 years after the beginning of CSS level 2, every website would be coded using this incredibly simple, elegant, and powerful solution to formatting web pages. Yet, my entire work history in web design and development has been a losing battle in advocacy of CSS use.
At my first positions at UWM I could understand why I was seeing so many awful table layouts and so little CSS – many of the sites were nearly 10 years old. The real shocker was that as I became involved redesign projects CSS still was nowhere to be found. I got used to this fact, and after a few years of working there, no ridiculous web practice could surprise me.
Or so I thought. Then I saw pages that clients attempted to make using Microsoft Front Page or some other equally wacky web page editor. Talk about overcomplicated, completely ineffective formatting code!
Then I started at Hal Leonard and saw the strangest combination of tables and CSS I’ve ever encountered. Tables galore, but with a different CSS style applied to every single table cell. Hundreds and hundreds of styles applied practically to every single sentence. No divs, no style information that spanned multiple elements, or you know, cascaded. Yup a complete lack of cascading styles when using Cascading Style Sheets.
I think a lot of people just don’t care or are afraid of using CSS. A lot of programmers don’t want to take the time to learn how to use CSS to align text when they know a font tag will do the same thing, even after I explain how you can use one line of CSS to achieve alignment on every page of your site, every paragraph even, rather than using thousands of <font> tags across a site. Others give it a try, run into some browser support troubles, and then revert back to tables, which aren’t even universally supported themselves!
Sigh.
CMS Made Simple
March 17th, 2009
I’ve worked with Joomla!, WordPress, Blogspot, Blogger, Zencart osCommerce, and custom CMS tools, and I must say that CMS Made Simple is by far my favorite. It just makes sense to me and I’m really surprised I don’t see it used more often.
Joomla! is definitely the star in the open-source CMS world, but frankly, I’m not a huge fan of it. Sections, categories, articles, etc when all I want to do is open the “About Us” page and edit its content is just not right. I don’t like that ALL of the website contents are listed as “articles.” What a strange and counterintuitive concept! This general organization principle drives me nuts and the additional confusion caused by the multiple menu managers and the way you have to upload new templates in a zipped directory with an xml file just make this system unwieldly to me.
CMS Made Simple on the other hand is… SIMPLE! CMSMS takes Joomla’s menu manager and article manager and combines them into one incredibly easy interface called Pages. Hey, an area called Pages where I go to edit pages, now that makes sense. In the Pages area you see a list of all of the pages on your site listed in the order they appear on your menu. You simply click a page title to edit the contents of that page directly rather than going and finding what articles are published on the page and then finding that article in the 75+ articles in the article manager. To reorder your menu, you don’t need a menu manager, you simply click up and down arrows to move the pages around and your menu is instantly updated. A new page will also be instantly added to your menu and the “parent” option makes it really easy to nest menu items. Editing templates thankfully involves no uploading of zip files and no xml configuration files, just HTML and CSS. Whew!!!
CMSMS also has a ton of additional features. I know that Joomla! does too, but I never got around to playing with them because the basics took too long to master. Great looking photo albums, easy to use blogs, public and private forums, newsletters, customizable web forms, and guestbooks all take less than an hour to install and configure. Amazing!
CMSMS does have its downfalls as it’s not really capable of a ton of end-user account management or social networking, but for the vast majority of personal and business sites I can’t imagine using anything else.
IE, tisk tisk
February 21st, 2009
So, recently I’ve started styling my form elements on pages pretty heavily. It’s one of those last little details I realized I needed to perfect to keep improving my projects. So I happily went about adding background colors and custom borders to my input elements and all was great until I opened things up in IE and saw borders around my radio buttons and checkboxes. Well, luckily, only one google search and five minutes later I found this solution. Simply add this to your CSS to clear up those nasty borders…
input[type=”checkbox“], input[type=”radio”]{
background: transparent;
border: 0;
}
… in IE7 only. IE6, of course, still displays the borders.
After a bit more effort I found this link to a helpful blog about code that cleared up the IE6 issue as well with some fairly simple Javascript.
An annoying problem, but I suppose that the fixes aren’t too bad. IE, when will we get to stop adding custom CSS and Javascript just to get you to do what other browsers all can easily handle?