Tailormade4you is a web design company that specializes in building websites that offer real value to businesses. This blog contains some thoughts and reflections on the stuff that we deal with on a daily basis - building sites, keeping clients happy and learning all the time.
August 17th, 2009 Christine Posted in Web Design No Comments »
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
March 5th, 2009 Christine Posted in Web Design No Comments »
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.
Tags: crystal project, crystal set, free icon, free icons, free stock, Web DesignFebruary 28th, 2009 Christine Posted in Web Design No Comments »
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.
Tags: design trends, latest trends, sifr, Web Design, wordpressJanuary 5th, 2009 Christine Posted in Web Design No Comments »
… 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!
Tags: browser issues, browser stats, hacks, ie8, internet explorer, style sheets, web developers