Canvas Prints – Special Offer
2020 Photography in Farnborough have a special offer on at the moment: Buy one canvas print and get another half price!
Starting at £25.00 for a 14″ x 10″ print, get your favourite photograph on canvas (wrapped around a backing frame) and the second (cheaper of the two) canvas print is just half price.
This is the perfect gift idea for Valentines Day, so hurry: offer ends 28th February.
The Survey for People Who Make Websites
Every year A List Apart Magazine hold their annual survey for people who make websites.
The questions you answer go a long way toward painting an accurate picture of the web industry today including the state of the current market and your hopes for the future.
Me? I told of how I still work a full time 40+ hour week for my main client and then have to share the remainder of my time amongst my other clients, still working a 60-80 hour week.
I told of how the industry is still good despite a pinch in the advertising dollars.
I expressed my desire to continue working my butt off, as everybody does in this industry, and to keep pushing the boundaries, although mainly on a personal level; the web continues to expand as does the skill set for working with it and everybody must continue to [over]fill their minds with ever-expanding levels and complexity of knowledge.
I spoke of my optimism for the industry and how much I believe in the web and how much I love it.
And, if you’re someone who makes websites, then you should contribute too 
Go ahead, take the A List Apart 2009 survey.
Simply Carpets and Flooring
I had a quick call the other day from a client asking me if a certain domain name was available and, if it was available, could I secure the domain name, build them a website, SEO it and get their email accounts sorted out.
Within half an hour I’d secured the domain, set up their hosting and designed a very quick logo and set it up on their holding page. I called the client back and that was that.
On Saturday morning, a little over 24 hours since I had initially spoken with the client, I was passing their shop in North Camp, Farnborough. I decided to stop and grab a photograph of the shopfront and was more than little surprised to see that the new shop had already been signwritten AND the web address was on the shopfront too! Talk about being quick!
It would have been better if they’d waited to get their sign written because my own 5 minute logo was better than the one their sign writer provided plus mine was better kerned too 
Also I couldn’t identify the fonts they’d used, even Identifont was no help (for the first time ever).
I raced back to the studio, dropped the original logo and knocked up another quick holding page for the client. So here we have, a little earlier than expected, a site for Simply Carpets and Flooring. Sure, it’s a bit 1999 for the moment but, bear in mind, it is a holding page and it had to be up quick. Besides, what else can you do when the client is so quick to get their web address up on their shopfront?
Newbies & Dreamweaver
A friend of mine has decided that he wants to be a web designer and has enrolled in a course to learn the basics of web design. It’s been really interesting getting feedback from him on how people regard web design these days and the most common thing he reports back about is that everybody wants to skip learning the boring HTML part and learn all about Dreamweaver, afterall, they’ve heard SO much about Dreamweaver and seem to think it’s the magic bullet.
This is for you, newbies and wannabe web designers who think you should be learning Dreamweaver and not HTML, this is straight from the web designers mouth. I’ve been doing web design for 11 years and using Dreamweaver for about 8 years, and this is what I think:
Dreamweaver is not the Magic Bullet: Dreamweaver is not the answer to all your web design prayers. Dreamweaver will not slay all your design demons. Dreamweaver is not the holy grail of web design. Dreamweaver will not help you sleep better in your web designer’s bed at night.I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear but this is not the X-factor. I will not build your hopes up and I will not say that you’re wonderful and you’re going to make it even if you’re crap. The harsh reality of web design is that it is a fiercely competitive world and you will either sink or you will need to swim and swim very well too. You will not be able to design websites just because you’re using Dreamweaver.My Advice: Learn HTML, learn to design & code and then maybe learn Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver is just a Tool: Moreso, Dreamweaver is a toolbox. If you turn up to a garage with a top-of-the-range SnapOn toolbox stuffed full of shiny SnapOn tools, that doesn’t make you a mechanic does it? Just because you own a shiny packed-full toolbox does not automatically qualify you to fix cars does it?
My Advice: Again, learn HTML, learn to design and then you could learn Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver is for experienced designers: I own a modified 300BHP Subaru Legacy. It looks great, sounds great and goes like the clappers. If you’ve just passed your driving test or if you’re not experienced or old enough then you won’t be able to drive my Subaru. Why? Because the insurance companies will not insure you on such a powerful, high IG car and by law you cannot drive without insurance. You will not be able to handle the power and the same goes for Dreamweaver. If you’re not experienced then don’t touch it, you won’t know what you’re doing with it.My Advice: Learn HTML first. Walk before you even think of running.
I’d point you to some forum posts I’ve seen over the years as to the debate on whether designers should use Dreamweaver or not, but they tend to be filled with the same polarised black & white nonsense and it’s usually not very helpful. What you would see in these forums would be either:
I love Dreamweaver, it’s wonderful.
or
I hate Dreamweaver, I only hand code.
These responses are a waste of time, a waste of forum space and a waste of server hard drive space. They serve no purpose to answering the debate over whether web designers should choose to use Dreamweaver or not.
If all you can say is that you love Dreamweaver then that’s great, I’m happy for you. Where did you spend your honeymoon and did people give the “happy couple” funny looks?
If you hate Dreamweaver because you’d rather hand code then you’re just a snob; you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. There’s really no point in being so ideologically opposed to it.
Neither of these standpoints actually answers the most important question of WHY? Why do you love Dreamweaver? Why do you hate Dreamweaver? “It’s great” and “it sucks” are really not very useful nor professional answers.
Here’s my take on Dreamweaver.
I started hand coding from a book on HTML back in 1998 (SAMS Teach yourself HTML in 24 hours. It’s out of print, and only the 2001 edition, which includes XHTML, is available) I didn’t touch Dreamweaver until about 2001. In those 3 years I learned HTML and design, all from scratch, totally self-taught. I had qualifications in Art, Design and Computer Science and a background in engineering and construction with some art & design commissions under my belt so I was well-suited for the design/technical aspects of the web design industry.
Dreamweaver, for me in my 8 years of using it, is a tool that helps me to manage multiple sites. It allows me to switch between working on a big project on one dedicated web server to another project on a shared server and manage the tens of thousands of files that may be in that site. (Yes, tens of thousands of files – did you think web design was all about 4 page websites?) With Dreamweaver I generally manage around 20 projects at any one time, so its pretty handy for keeping things organised. I could fill it up with every site I manage, but there’s really no point if they’re not maintained regularly (I tend to archive sites for good housekeeping and re-install them locally as needs be)
Dreamweaver is a managed and manageable environment for me, so it does virtually everything I need it to do. OK, DW FTP can be slow, not capable of multiple connections and not fully featured, so I will use Filezilla to back me up in those situations. I prefer to edit .htaccess files and check my error logs in Notepad++ and edit my CSS in TopStyle but that’s cool, because Dreamweaver does most of the other things I need it to.
Dreamweaver allows me to manage my workflow. With templates and code snippets I can rapidly work new HTML pages and deploy regularly-used pieces of code.
Dreamweaver allows me to work in design view, code view or both, meaning that I can switch between designer and developer coding easily. If I’m happy with the code that Dreamweaver spits out I can use the design view. If I want to keep an eye on it I use the split view to see both the code & design views and if I’m working purely in PHP I can just use the code view.
Sure, if I allow it to, Dreamweaver occasionally throws up code I don’t always like, but because I know my HTML/XHTML and I work in code view aswell, I can spot it a mile off and fix it. Of course, Dreamweaver can be buggy and doesn’t always give me the shortcuts I need but I get by and it is a time saver.
I didn’t like that Adobe brought-out Macromedia, that move seems to have made the marketplace less competitive, but what can I do about that? However, that said, I’m still using Create Suite 3 as opposed to the new-fangled CS4 but with Photoshop and Illustrator bundled-in alongside Flash & Fireworks, I’m more than happy with the CS3 package.
So, if you get to know your HTML 4.01 and 5, XHTML 1.0 strict and transitional, CSS 1, 2 & 3, Fireworks, Photoshop & Flash, learn your FTP and understand your LAMP environments, get to grips with MySQL on phpMyAdmin and your command line work on PuTTY ssh client, tweak your Apache webserver and keep up with PHP aswell as being able to wrangle your sites in your beloved Dreamweaver then you’re probably going to make a good web designer.
But don’t get too hung up on the tools or the technology, just make sure you can actually DESIGN things, that’s the really important part of being a web designer. (The clue is in the term DESIGNer) And Dreamweaver is not the be-all and end-all of web design. Some people hate it and don’t/won’t use it, but that’s entirely up to them. Personally I think it’s a very handy tool that I use daily and could pobably not live without. However, as this article is aimed at newbies, know your code first and then use the tools (if they’re right for you). You too may either love or hate Dreamweaver, or better still just find Dreamweaver to be one more big handy tool in your web design toolbox.
SHIT Scaffolding - Email john@hitscaffolding.com or info@hitscaffolding.com
MOO II
My MOO business cards arrived yesterday.
The business card holding box was very solid and cardboard rather than the usual plastic boxes, made from recycled pulp and biodegradable.
The MOO branding was fun & funky, as you’d expect, with a paper wrap on the outside of the card holder declaring
“Quick, schedule a meeting! Your Business Cards have arrived.”
As for the cards themselves I’d placed the company logo on the back of the cards from an original PNG and it looked OK in landscape. On the flipside I’d placed the logo again but in portrait with my details below.
The logo wasn’t as sharp as I expected even though (I thought) I’d supplied a hi-res PNG. The 350gsm card felt a lot flimsier than the cards I created for a client the other week at 400gsm. The lettering was OK – it was from a restricted number of fonts available (about 12) and the choice of formatting was also limited (bold line or not bold line, no bold characters or individual words)
So, on the whole? I like the MOO brand and their marketing, they certainly have an appeal and a personality that is very pleasing. The cards were the “Green uploader” – 100% recycled, totally chlorine free (TCF) and no frills. The limitation of font use and control over the layout was not something a designer likes to have to deal with.
But the price and the relative ease of creating the cards means that they’re are popular and MOO will go far. £14.04 for 50 green cards including delivery (That was with a 10% discount code)
If you’re a designer or you need to impress your clients with a top quality card or your clients expect no less than a spot-varnished sliver of royal standards then it’s probably best to create your business cards in Photoshop or Illustrator and go see your local printer. But if you’re on a budget and need a fistful of cheap, quick cards that are better than the usual entry-level fare then MOO are a good choice.
I’m now going to dig out that issue of Computer Arts with the tutorial on designing for the foil/metallic printing process – I need my cards to look like chrome…
MOO
In the 9 years that I’ve been running 22i design I don’t recall ever having any business cards. That may sound a bit strange but we’ve honestly never really had the need for them.
However, with the latest upturn in business (thanks to all the good people who’ve recommended us) plus recently designing the classy little business cards for ICCTS I decided to dip my toes in the water and thought I’d give the much talked about MOO a try.
Compared to the normal process of designing business cards, where you completely craft the artwork from scratch and send it to your friendly neighbourhood printer, (in our case Charterlith Printers in Fleet) MOO is a simple automated online affair where you pick the type of card you want, upload the artwork, type some text in and then pay.
One of our web clients uses the well-known Vistaprint service for their stationery. You can tell that the print quality and design/style is below what you pay for regular design & print but there is a market out there for cheap business cards.
So whilst we’d dearly love to have dreamt up something along the lines of any one of the 100 really creative business cards (our logo would look great with a bit of spot varnish on a completely matt card) all we’re trying to do here is test out the budget end of the market and, all-in, we paid around £14.04 for 50 double-sided 350gsm 100% recycled card TCF business cards to be printed and delivered (by next Thursday). That’s about 28p a card.
The process was relatively painless but, as a designer, you miss the total control you have over the creative process. There were, for instance, only a dozen or so fonts to choose from and only line-by-line options (for example you can’t increase the weight of, italicise certain words or letters or switch fonts or font sizes).
It’s all very simple and templated however, for the price, you can’t complain so I’ll report back when they arrive; I’m sure they’ll “do the job”.
Coffee website
Tamka
A set of extensions to bring blogging power to Joomla! CMS.
My friend, designer Arno Zijlstra , just pinged me regarding a new Joomla! project that promises to bring “blogging power to individuals and communities” on the Joomla! Content Management System. The project is called Tamka (Speak Up!)
As a long-time Blogger (this blog is Blogger-powered) and WordPress user, it’s good to see Joomla! getting some attention in the blog tool department but what exactly we’ll be getting we don’t know yet.
I’ve never seriously used Joomla! as a pure blogging tool and, quite frankly, it’s not supposed to be. Not only is there a ton of core code but Joomla! is a far more powerful fully-featured CMS and a blog should be considered as one channel of your web offering.
is4profit.com, the SME resource website, is a Joomla! powered portal for small business information & advice and apart from the many sections within their site they would benefit from a business blog, so let’s see if the new Tamka.org can pique their interest when it’s released.
We’ll keep you posted or you can follow Tamkaorg on twitter.
UPDATE: Tamka is live and looking good. Congrats to the team and here’s looking forward to testing
Problematic Changes
As I designer I’m all for changing websites; maybe the design got a bit stuffy, maybe there’s a new layout you’d like to try, maybe you’ve got a better idea than before, or even your focus has changed.
Change is good. But yesterday I noticed some websites that once had very important links to my clients’ websites had changed. The layout changed and so had the content. The links were missing.
I wish changes to old websites would include keeping the old content. Whilst there may be more work to do in the short-term there’s ultimately less playing of “catchup” and you’ve already got a raft of content that may be indexed in the SERPs, even ranking quite well and picking up some traffic.
Please people, think about a site upate as a full, holistic upgrade including keeping your old content.
Crawler.com hijacked my browser
After installing an app last weekend I’ve had Crawler.com hijack my browser to be my default search engine. I didn’t tell Crawler.com to do that so I’m pretty pissed off with them and every attempt to uninstall the damned search engine has failed.
The hijack doesn’t appear to have had a massive effect on boosting their brand awareness except, in my case, in a very negative way. I know Alexa isn’t the perfect guage of site usage, but a quick squint at the traffic details for crawler.com shows that their rank and page views have increased but that their reach has gone down. It should all be going down for their cynical installation strategy.
So how do you remove Crawler.com from Firefox?
Well, after a quick search on the web, using Google.co.uk, I found that in Firefox you need to do the following:
In the address bar enter about:config
Look for the following entries as these were the ones that had been hijacked on my Firefox:
browser.search.defaultenginename
browser.search.order.1
My entries here were Crawler Search so I changed them to Google.co.uk
Bugger! That didn’t work. What was I missing? I searched through the settings and figured that all the ones in BOLD were user defined, so I ran through just those one s and found:
keyword.URL
THIS was the last setting to still have Crawler in it, so I right-clicked the entry and selected the last option: RESET.
That cured my Crawler hijack problem. Good riddance.