Ever wondered what is the difference between HTML and XHTML? If someone asks you to develop a site that is W3 compliant do you wonder what it means?

More than that, have you ever wondered as a web designer how to create and mainpulate images for your design of your site but you have never had the courage to wade through reams and reams of Photoshop tutorials. Besides, there are so many different versions of Photoshop - you tried a tutorial once and then discovered that it was for an obsolete version of Photoshop!

Then we won’t even go into how to learn the nitty gritty of PHP and Javascript. In fact, you might not even know the difference, or where to use what.

Lastly - learn Joomla and put all of this newly acquired knowledge to the best use. Joomla is by far the best tool to learn how to build websites, and with all of this supporting knowledge you will have a head start in becoming a web development professional.

Become part of this very exciting career field and learn the secrets of web development now.

Our full course starts on the 23rd of August - can you afford to miss it?

Read more about our full development course (or make bookings for individual modules) here!

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We will be holding a free seminar on the importance of an SEO strategy for a website on 27 August 2009 between 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon.

We have just sent out a press release regarding the seminar through Bizcommunity (http://www.bizcommunity.com/PressOffice/PressRelease.aspx?i=123334&ai=38934)

Read more about the importance of doing SEO for a website here and make a booking for the free seminar:
http://www.tm4y.co.za/free-seo-seminar.html

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I love icons. I love fonts as well, and it is difficult to say which one of the two I like the most!

Smashingmagazine came out with another nice post (as always) about using icons, which just reminded me again about how underutilized icons actually are and how much impact and interest they can add to a site. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/03/how-to-use-icons-to-support-content-in-web-design

Here are some links to some free icon resources:

http://www.freeiconsweb.com/ - contains about 15 000 icons in various categories

http://www.freeiconsdownload.com – also a large variety of free icons, divided into categories.

http://www.vistaicons.com/ - Nice variety - most of them in the large, glossy, Vista style.

http://dryicons.com/free-icons/ - Here are some nice icon sets that I haven’t seen in other places (for example, there is a lot of duplication between Freeiconsweb.com and Freeiconsdownload.com)

And then, remember the excellent icons from Everaldo, the Crystal icon set(s). These come in various variations. They have been in development for quite some time and you can therefore download various versions of them from various places.

www.everaldo.com/crystal/?action=downloads – here you can find the latest version called the Crystal Project. The older Crystal set icons have been overhauled and freshened up, so to speak.

http://min.frexy.com/article/milky_a_free_vector_icon_set_part_1/ There is a part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 in this series and have proved to be very popular.

http://www.iconeden.com/icon/bright-free-stock-iconset.html - another collection of 148 free icons. Well you can never have too many….Just note that this is a single file in .ai format

http://www.iconbulk.com/ - These are LOTS of small sets of icons, all focused on a specific theme, allowing you to download a wide and eclectic range of icons at a rate of about 5 or 10 in a set.

For more customized icons and smaller icons sets you can always do a search for ‘free vector icons’ in Google – you will be surprised to see how many resources turn up.

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• Web Design trends for 2009 (0)

Came across this post by Smashingmagazine.com on the latest trends in web design for 2009.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/14/web-design-trends-for-2009/

In summary - web design trends are moving away from the glossy look and feel styles of the ‘Web 2.0′  era and more into a look that is more decorative, grungy, stylistic and feature rich.

Of course, certain elements still remain - use of large text, optimal use of white space, bold colours, but other elements that were so typical of the ‘Web 2.0′ look are definitely taking a backstage role - glossy and plastic buttons, reflections, gradients…

What is definitely ‘in’ are textures, as well as ‘handwritten’ text and fonts and also using SIFR for font replacement. I have been using SIFR for a while here and there on some client sites and on some of my free Wordpress templates (see http://demo.wpthemes.co.za) in the past couple of months. It is just interesting to see that its use is getting more and more prevalent.

Of course, using SIFR for font replacement can take you into the dangerous waters of possibly using commercial fonts illegally.  Remember that the one of the big reasons why we as web designers are normally restricted to using good ole’ arial-tahoma-verdana-helvetica-sans-serif is that the actual font file that is used to render the text must reside on each individual computer. And there are only a limited number of fonts that are distributed with the computer that you are buying - most other fonts are commercial. 

So if you do want to use a commrecial font in your SIFR application you have to buy a license for it (or just use one of the many free fonts around!)

Apparently there is also a new method to do font replacement - Cufon, that doesn’t work with flash but rather with Javascript.

I haven’t tried it out myself yet but might just do so to see how it works.

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• Use of Icons in web design (0)

… much like that of Mark Twain at the time, might be slightly exaggerated.

Although the day is coming when 90% of the effort that is put into the design of a site might for a change NOT be devoted to fixing up cross browser issues.

Heavens, what ARE all these web developers going to do with their time?

According to the latest statistics the use of Internet Explorer 6 has fallen below 20% for the first time this month (December 2008).

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Although of course, also in the words of Mark Twain there are lies, damned lies and statistics…

Nevertheless this is a welcome trend.

As stated, we just wonder what web developers are going to do if they do not specifically have to use hacks, workarounds, extra style sheets, extra effort and so forth to fix up designs to compensate for those special little IE6 quirks such as the way that IE6 handles floats, the extra padding, the positioning problems.

Here are two links to fixing IE6 problems in the mean time:

http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/ie6-core-bug-fixing

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/03/06/10-fixes-for-ie6-problems/

Quite possibly though IE8 will have its own set of problems although all indications seem to be that in general it is an improvement on IE7 and more standards compliant. Time will tell though. Up to now we have not started to explicitly test for IE8 - according to the browser stats the usage of IE8 is still very low (less than 1%).

But it is coming!

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