InfoGraphic Design logotype

 

After 17 years of web design and coding, I've decided that maybe I should place some actual content on my own site and URL. A good friend quoted an old saying that the "the cobbler's kids' feet are always bare"... seems apropos to my situation.

I really don't have the time, and never have had, to write a website for myself. I've always had more work than I can finish, it seems. But I should have a web presence, at least they say I should, so I decided that instead of launching something fully formed, which may never happen, since it might take hundreds of hours to create what I have in mind, I'm just going to start throwing up some interesting examples of projects that I've completed... well, at least they're interesting to me, and talk about how they were done... plus anything I find interesting in the world of graphics, and that's a lot.

If you see some strange colored boxes floating around some of the page elements from time to time, it's just some CSS code to help me see how the page is developing. I don't use graphics editors like Dreamweaver for websites, but rather type everything out in a text editing program called BBedit, so the borders help me visualize my changes and the actual space they occupy.

My usual wont in writing websites, is to run everything from a database called mySQL, and use a popular scripting language called php to manage my content. As a result the whole website is essentially written in one page... so that's why I never quote by the page ;-).

For those interested , I also use javascript wherever possible for a smoother viewer experience. While I know how to develop in Flash and have used it in the past, I am trying to move away from it. Apple's IOS does not support it, and may never, so the iPAD is a no-show with Flash content.

There are many things Flash can do that would be hard to do with standards based tools (html, javascript, css) at least as long as Microsoft's Internet Explorer v6, 7 and 8 are so far behind the times, but we must move on, and with IE9 much of what Flash can do on the web can be rendered by javascript in HTML5.

I also no longer write websites that support IE6. It literally takes 30% longer to make all the workarounds to display the page well. Who wants to pay for that? With less that 8% user share for IE6 now, it is not that big a deal any more that some people won't have as pretty an experience on the web. Do yourself a favor and upgrade to IE9, which has many new features! Mac and Firefox users need not worry, you're good.