Web Design/Development

Ah, SMF themes, cool stuff.

I actually find it harder to tweak a layout, especially if I want to really change it up, I find a fresh start from scratch is the cleanest and fastest solution.

I have Ultima to thank for my complete switch to 100% CSS layouts in my designs. CSS is easy, making sure it works in all major browsers, that's the bitch lol.

www.renaissanceconsulting.ca

That would be my company's website that I recently finished up. There's still small ongoing changes, and a few bits of content yet to add, but it's basically complete.

I'm working on another, bit bigger project, which will be online once I'm done with the massive overhaul it's undergoing. Currently it resides on my laptop. Once it's stable and secure, I'll post a link to it online.

I've really only been into web design stuff for the past couple years or so. I never figured I'd be one to get into this line of work, but I got a chance to work on a php ecommerce site, when I didn't even know any php at all, and it just kind of went from there.

I really hadn't put a lot of time or effort into learning the design aspect of things until the past 4 to 6 months. I've finally kicked the tables habit, and can develop clean efficient layouts pretty damn fast.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Bigblah

That's like, light-years apart.

How does one pick up aesthetics in 3 months, I wonder.

I know, it's pretty crazy, but that's about the same thing that I did over the past few months, only my improvements were more internal, just because we knew how we wanted the site to look, I simply took the wrong method of laying it out and ran with it all the way. So to the end user it looked alright, but was a bitch to work with. Hence my current headache of an overhaul. ;_;

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Render, html and css are just as much a part of webdesign as php is. php outputs html files, so you still need to know how to make it work even if it's going to be powered by php.

Or....are you saying that you wouldn't want those classes because you already have skills in that area. It's great to reread things lol.

PHP is best learned on one's own, starting projects from scratch. I've always found it's the only way to truly learn it, because it has so many functions and variations on how to do things, that if you only use the methods they teach in a school, you won't be as skilled as if you learned all the ins and outs, and when it's best to use the different techniques.

Maybe I'm just biased because I got nothing out of any programming classes I have ever been in.

On another note, I've also been contemplating starting a web design business sometime, however I tend to prefer working on the guts of a site, not the design part. As much as I can do alright in that department, I just prefer to be playing with the database and internal code stuffs. We should talk.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

For debugging purposes, I ensure that the page renders correctly in firefox, and IE 6, at the absolute very least. Anything else, like safari, etc etc, I'll test when I get the opportunity, and fix as best I can, but there's only so much you can do to have compatibility everywhere.

I dunno about saying flash has no place on websites. Yeah I hate entirely flash driven websites, but for the occasional effect here and there, it works great. I have to say I think the flash intro that we put together for our site www.renaissanceconsulting.ca was done quite well, not much to it, loads damn fast, and yes I have a link to skip the intro inside the html. Maybe I just happened to actually use flash as it was intended, dunno. LOL

There's also the issue of dialup friendly issues. If your site takes too long to load, that still is a large audience you're either inconveniencing, or cutting out completely. A 1MB flash might not seem like a lot to you, but that can take 10 minutes or more on dialup, so keep that in mind.

Also something like newgrounds would have a database backend, so anything is possible at that point.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Well, I have to say, yeah I could've made that in powerpoint, but you can't really put a powerpoint on the web that easily. <_<

Also yeah, I think frames are utterly useless, I have yet to find a home for them. More likely to break the site then anything else.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Erisu, the CSS works in firefox, what you're suggesting is way more work than is required to make that work. The CSS hacks that are on the web for this type of issue are far cleaner and easier to implement, and are a lot more kosher I would think. I know some of the issues I came across like that involved vertical align issues, or just a matter of floating elements, and actually I had issues where formatting the code nicely didn't work, I had to butt the elements together in the html for IE to get it to be seen right
aka:

<span>this</span><span>that</span>

instead of

<span>this</span>
<span>that</span>

Believe me I was pissed off when that fixed things for me, but grateful that it did fix things.

So basically, no image editing should be needed, it's all in the css.

By the way, if you ever need IE to see a css code bit that you don't want firefox to see, put an underscore in front of it.

background-color: #000000;
_background-color: #FFFFFF;

If you put that bit of code into the body element, it would render as black in firefox, and white in IE. Kinda freaky how that works, but it's saved my ass a few times.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?