Poll
Loading ...Designing for a disability?
Web designers do you consider people with disabilities when designing your websites. Do you consider the difficulties and requirements needed to navigate your site? Seriously in this day and age your sites should cater for anyone and should discriminate in any way at all. Ok that’s a bit harsh granted you can’t cover everyone but the majority should be considered and here are some basics to get you started:
• Resizable text
o A simple zoom in zoom out function could help here and is beneficial for people with sight problems
• Colour blind people
o Beware of using too many colour fades a large percentage of the population have vision problems
• Screen readers
• Subtitles for videos
• Site function without a mouse
Cross Browser pains
This must be every web developers and designer’s worst nightmare, in fact at times even SEO’s come across browser compatibility issues. Words from every designer’s mouth must be why browsers can’t be the same it would make our live so much easier. So very true but as always people like choice and everyone should be considered. A big mistake is to design just for one browser as there are millions of users who like to use a myriad of browsers.
The main element to cross browser compatibility is CSS. Sometimes web people can spend hours paying with CSS code to get things displaying correctly and this can be a painstaking task.
Freelancing, have you thought about it?
A number of web designers out there have thought about going it alone in the web design and unfortunately on some have just thought about it and never took it any further than that. For those that have it can provide mixed stories as with anything it has it good and bad points.
Good
• Your own boss
• You make the rules
• Can be quite lucrative
• If successful you could launch into a full on business
Bad
• You’re the only creative, who do you share ideas with?
• You will be cooped up in your bedroom
• Risk involved if you don’t make enough money
You have to seriously active in getting new contracts and explore as many avenues as possible.
Wordpress 3.0, have you taken the plunge?
Wordpress have finally released their new brand spanking new version 3.0. Packed with new features wordpress can be an amazing tool for SEO’s, web designers, developers and bloggers alike. Although as usual with any software this is full of bugs which are being dealt with as we speak version three is the most anticipated release of this year.
Here are some of the great new features:
- New welcome screen
- Better security and usability
- New wordpress theme
- Better customisation
- Allows child themes
- Header images
- Custom backgrounds
- Link shortened
- Easy menu setup
- Support for templates
- Custom post types
Useful jQuery plug-ins
Web design is a great vocation and without it we wouldn’t have some of the greatly inspired designs we have today. There’s comes a time in every web designers life where they will come across a number of challenges and one of those is with an SEO. SEO requires text rich sites which most designers like to express with image.
This is probably a big reason why designers and SEOs hate each other. Here are some jQuery plugins (search engine friendly) that may help with those issues:
- Codaslider 2
- Multi panel slider
- Panel Gallery
- Image gallery
- MB Menu
- Multi level drop down menu
- Jq Touch
- Iphone developer app
Magento widgets
The latest version of Magento introduced a new way of displaying blocks of content on your site: widget. I bit like the way they work in WordPress, widgets in Magento are designed to help the user do more and write less confusing code.
Once created, the widget can be used like a block in the xml or like an entity in the text editor. The latest is what you client will probably like the most. They just select the widget you have created and insert it in place where they want the special content to display, done.
No more fiddling with strange html block and stuff.
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