I ran across this great article on site navigation. Its brief, but to the point. There are standard navigation layouts for web sites–and good reasons for using them–but are we as designers being lazy in not evolving how we design navigation systems? I think maybe we are.
Tags: laziness?, Web Design, web navigation
Often when a client requests an interactive calendar be included on their site I recommend embedding a Google Calendar. Its a wonderful app that is easy to use, update and install in a website. The only downfall is that Google gives limited options for customizing the embedded calendar’s color scheme, which has been a problem up until now
Chris Dornfeld has a simple to use php script that can display your Google Calendar with whatever colors you desire. Check it out:
Tags: Cool fixes, Google Calendar, PHP Script
1st Web Designer has posted the first part in a series of articles on bad, very BAD, design flaws that can ruin a web site. Many of these should be common knowledge, but I suppose if they were, articles like this wouldn’t be needed…
Tags: sucky web designs
Via Clients from Hell:
“The only problem I have with the pages load so fast you can’t even tell they’re changing. Could you put a page in between the pages, so it takes longer to load?”
Tags: Clients From Hell, Funny, Web Design
Formally, the only way to add custom content to a Facebook fan page was via FBML (Facebook Mark-up Language), which was–honestly–a big pain to edit and maintain. Recently I have become aware of a new FB App called iFrame Wrapper, which utilizes iFrame technoogy to embed any web content you desire into your Facebook fan page as a new tab/menu item, with the option of customizable menu icons. With this you can create custom content, hosted on your own server and post it as a menu item on your FB Fan Page. If you need to change or edit the content, you merely change the html files on your server.
This is an excellent application and I highly recommend it.
Tags: Facebook, iframe, Web Design
Typophile.com, via their Twitter feed, just shared a couple of great links that I wanted to pass onto everyone.
Enjoy!
John Leys
Leys Web & Graphic Design
Tags: fonts
We are proud to announce the launch of the Frog Fotography web site, for whom we also designed a company logo. All the graphics on the site were custom made by Leys Web and Graphic Design and the site includes a WordPress blog customized by us to match the look and layout of the rest of the site.
There will likely be a few nips and tucks as we finalize the content text, but I am very happy with how it turned out.
ScribeFire is a very useful blogging plug-in for the Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari web browsers. Once it is installed you just press F8 to open the ScribeFire panel in Firefox:
To ad your blog to ScribeFire just click the “add” button in the “blog” tab in the right hand panel. This will open the account wizard, which is pretty straight forward. You’ll enter your blog address and log into your account.
Once the wizard is done your blog is added to the blog list in the right hand panel (and you can add an manage multiple blogs from here).
Then you just select which blog you want to use and type your blog entry in the main window and click “publish to …” when you are done. From the right-hand panel you can also add categories to the current entry or edit/view past entries.
This plug in makes blogging much easier and more convienient, since you don’t have to log into your blog everytime you want to publish an entry.
You can download the latest version of ScribeFire from http://www.scribefire.com/
Good Blogging!
John Leys
Tags: blogging
1st Web Designer has posted a great list of useful and entertaining Facebook Apps that are available. Everything from on-line photo editors to new ways to customize your “fan pages”. Check them out!
I just received news of a free seminar being held on Thursday, February 24 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm at the Central Oregon Community College Bend campus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and brand development. The official description reads:
Having a good website is not enough for an online business to succeed. Come observe as different businesses put their websites in the hot seat for 6 professionals judge them from different angles including: SEO, Development, Social Media, Marketing and Design. Hear how those businesses can improve their sites and take home ideas to make your website better.
The seminar is free, but you have to register for it by going to http://noncredit.cocc.edu. Scroll down to where it says “register by course number” and enter 16791 to find the listing and follow the instructions given.
This looks like it will be a great seminar and a great opportunity for some free advice on SEO and web development.
Tags: Seminars, SEO, Web Development
