Photoshop is now available as an online service in the form of Photoshop Express. I'll be back soon with some more info once I've tested it out...

Labels: design, services

As a designer I'm quite often working on text files here & there and sometimes cutting & pasting data from various sources into MS Word means that the formatting is all wrong (tip: paste into notepad first to strip formatting then paste that output into Word) or there's no formatting at all.

For instance - I want to find out how many items there were in this small business news page.

Rather than count line-by-line there's a labour-saving technique to be had with Find & Replace in Word. So I copied the main page content into Word and had a one-line output. Seeing that every item began with either '2007' or '2008' I simply executed find '2007' and replace all with '^p 2007' and find '2008' and replace all with '^p 2008'

^p 6p is basically a line break.

So I replaced all the year dates with linebreaks and ended up with 79 lines/articles

Life saver :)

Labels: copy writing, design, development, office, tips

I've been busy using a huge array of free web tools over the last few weeks and the OctaGate SiteTimer has proved to be very handy.

Whilst optimising the HTML and PHP code in a number webpages I used the SiteTimer, checking to see if there were any noticeable speed gains, and the OctaGate SiteTimer not only showed the speed of the page but of the individual files that the page pulled in.

By that it showed me the speed and loading times of:

• The page as a whole
• Favicons
• Cascading Style Sheets
  
• External JavaScripts
• Image files

What the SiteTimer highlighted was that one of the pages I was pulling in had 3 favicons being called when there was only a need for the 1. So I dived into the CMS I was using, hacked the templates and saved 2x file calls and a good couple of seconds of server time.

In addition SiteTimer highlighted that there were a couple of redundant images I was calling in to my pages and not using... now time to hunt down the code for those images and kill them off too...

Labels: design, development, tools

New Life in IT is a premier web design company specialising in the provision of Open Source Software solutions.

With a firm footing in the Joomla! CMS arena, New Life in IT provide a depth of experience from Business Analysis & Consulting through Professional Training to some pretty funky enterprise level web development solutions... we know because we've had the pleaseure to work with them.

Andrew Eddie, Director of New Life in IT, is well known as one of the original developers of Mambo CMS and the recent Joomla! CMS so they're headed not only by a sharp programmer & consumate professional but all-round nice bloke too.

Be sure to check out New Life in IT.

Labels: CMS, consultancy, design, development, news, open source

In the early days, back in '98, I found IE4 to be a better browser than NS Navigator. Personally I found the NSN buttons and tool bars to bloated and gimmicky and the cleaner lines of IE4 allowed just that little bit more screen to show.

But here, 9 years later, I have found that my browsing habits changed and they did so a few years ago. I tried Opera because it was new, it was different. I tried Firefox and fell in love with it. And I know that sometimes Firefox has memory leaks, I know it locks my system up occasionally, but that's because I can often run 20+ tabs at a time and regularly do that in two windows... a work window and a leisure window...

But I'd rather have that Fox logo on my shirt than just a plain old E.

I design clean code and I like my browser to respect that.

Labels: browsers, design, development

I was just knocking up some 120x60 ad buttons for a clients in-house campaign yesterday and needed a little inspiration, some eye candy to kick-start my creative process. Bookmarking ALL the sites where 120x60 advertising buttons are shown is quite cool but you can do a LOT of surfing to get your inspiration & ideas.

So when I stumbled upon the 120x60 ad button section of the site BannerReport.com I found myself in an Aladdin's cave of ad buttons.

And with that inspiration I came up with these...

Labels: advertising, design