Archive for March, 2010

IE Hacking, Again

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

I loathe IE, and what developer doesn’t.  Can I get an amen from the choir!?  Anyway, found another useful hack for IE.  When putting Flash content on a site, sometimes the user is required to click the Flash component to activate it.  Annoying, but easy to fix.  For all of you jQuery lovers, here is how to fix it.  (You can laugh under your breath.)

$(‘#flashWrapper’).html( $(‘#flashWrapper’).html() );

So basically you are taking your Flash embed code and adding it back to the div that contains the, you guessed it, your Flash embed code.  Believe me, I laughed when I discovered that this was a fix for this issue as well.  So simple.  So trivial.  But the thing works.

- Blessings

SEO vs SEM Part 2

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Search Engine Optimization, or “Organic Search” results as defined in Part 1 of this series, is all the things you can do to advance your website in the regular unpaid listings on Google, or other search engines.

There are many things that your site designer can do to help your site be as optimized as possible. But AT LEAST 50% of your search engine optimization is up to you, I think it’s more like 75%. Here are some of the basic things we do to make sure your site is optimized:
- build sites in DIVs with CSS
- include a keyword relevant, reasonable title for each page
- include text links to all main pages of the site
- include a site map
- place ALT tags on all images
You don’t have to understand what the heck we just said.  There are many more that we do but won’t go into here. Those are just some of the basics.

Honestly, that paragraph is far less important than this one. Here are some of the things that YOU can do to improve your SEO that will outweigh the things mentioned above:
- UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY
- Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, whatever Social Network you use – post updates there about your site and provide links
- UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY
- Ask friends with sites, or companies that provide complimentary but not competing services to link to you
- UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY

All of this stuff is explained further in the Blog Post – Committing to Your Website, take a look at it.

Sketching: Ideas On Paper

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Sketch - Layout

Developing concepts and ideas for a website design, icon or logo, or any type of graphic development can seem like an overwhelming task at times. No matter how many websites you have created or logos you’ve developed, the creative process is always something that can take a lot out of you. True, there are days when this process seems to come as easily and naturally as walking or breathing, but those days come about less often then I would care to admit. This is where sketching, for me, enters the picture (no pun intended). Sketching out ideas and concepts helps me quickly sift throughout the ideas trapped inside my head. I must admit, I do spend a bit too much time in this phase of the project because of my love for it.

Zoowee Bubble Layout

Layout sketches for Zoowee Music. Developed layout for container that would hold Artist profile, album list, songs, etc.

Thanks to an extremely talented artistic mother, I have been sketching obsessively since I was young. Thankfully web and graphic design gives me an outlet to put this obsession to use. Sketching out layouts for websites is essential to my process, but I really enjoy icon and graphic development. This is where the pen and pencil really helps me plan out how an objects or graphics will end up being rendered on the computer.

Zoowee Icon Development

Zoowee Icon Development

Zoowee Dashboard Sketch

Sketch for Zoowee Dashboard Graphics. Depicting the monitoring and managment of your Zoowee Bubbles.

Icon Development for Zoowee

Launch Icon Development

Rocky Horton helped me discover the graph paper moleskin (I know, I know its typical designer to carry this around but it fits so well into my bag and they are so easy to keep organized) which has really helped with sketches for websites and logos. Its a wonder I didn’t make this connection sooner (living in a pixel based world).

Addicted to the Outdoors Sketch

Layout sketch for Addicted to the Outdoors

I’ll post a follow-up to this with more of my sketches once I get my sketch books together. This just happens to be the sketchbook sitting in front of me at the time, but I will sift through the boxes I have at home and post some more detailed images and more on my process in my next post.

Funny Google Transcripts – Volume 2

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Call me back. Good Shepherd.

There are a lot of lengthy Google Voice transcripts that I have gotten that are in fact funnier than this one, but I keep coming back to this one. It makes me laugh.

For more check out http://gvWTF.com