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All the previous months I fell into a music void. I thought that I couldn’t find new sounds and I got bored of the same style of music I lean to.
Last December I heard by accident a very interesting sound-clip as I was driving home from work. After some days I discovered the band name and soon I had all the work from the group. The name of the band is Lanterna which refers to the term “lanterna magica”, an early kind film projector.
Lanterna play “...music that will both soothe and gnaw at you.” This quote could probably be the best description of the sound that reaches your ears. Lanterna play instrumental music and the humming of Henry Frayne (the guitarist and composer of the group), is the only voice among the smooth guitars, the keyboards and the background ambiance.
When you listen to the group you get the feeling of a trip in a dry place up on the mountains. Indeed the particular soundscape is what characterizes the ambient of their music according to most reviews. Beauty, illusion, space, psychedelic, haunting, pensive, and atmospheric are some other words written for Lanterna’s music.
Lanterna is a great group carrying a totally new sound and it can be an excellent companion for your music trips on or off the reality.
This post might seem a little clumsy but this is how things get going actually. Day by day I tend to keep files and get organized online.
For example I store all my bookmarks to del.icio.us. I have my emails kept at the mail server so they can be accessed anytime from any computer. I recently have uploaded my address books as well. I started collaborating online and many of our team documents have been saved somewhere else but not in my computer. And of course all of my web projects stay at the web server.
However I do not have find an easy solution for my images.
The abundance of the space provided by several services combined with the validity incline us to change the way we traditionally treat storage. Imagine a house where your belongings stay somewhere else. Before you go to the grocery to buy a chicken the chicken belongs to the owner of the shop. When you buy it belongs to you. Would you move it from your small fridge to the town fridge in order to gain space? Would you feel safe during the transfer or would you be afraid of a possible robbery? In the end would you like your very own chicken which you have paid with your very own hot money been kept in someone else’s fridge?
Day to day activity shows that the metaphor used above works very well in the digital era because we trust both our Internet connections and the storage systems. So services like del.icio.us have established a relationship of integrity. It is actually so solid that I do believe that my bookmarks will never get lost under any circumstances.
Looking at how we, the people, change our thought against situations like the one above could be an excellent lesson of how professionals in general should treat customer, so that by the end of the day these people could follow us blindfolded.
From all the above I end up to three conclusions:
Using the Internet as a storage system becomes an everyday practice. It is not as simple as it sounds.
To become trustworthy is an essential step towards professional success.
It is still difficult to leave your chicken at someone else’s fridge :o)
Looking for CMS’s or blogs you tend to select free packages such as Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, Typo, Typo3 or even Wordpress. These tools are good and as a general note one could say: the more flexible solution the better for all. But what do we mean by the word “flexible” and what with the word “all”?
“All” has to do with the developer, the customer and the user. Like a pyramid a user has specific needs, a customer should be able to do a lot of things easily while a developer must be able to determine both of the other groups requirements and even more, such as to modify the look and feel of the result which is in this case a multi-site.
“Flexible” for a user has to do with how he communicates and interacts with a website. I won’t go into details, since this might be the beginning of a very useful, yet irrelevant topic. Flexible for a customer implies an easy way to manage his content, add new, add or remove whole modules from his website and switch themes among others. Things become more perplexed when it comes to the developer. All of the previously mentioned engines might produce a quite similar appearance but it requires a different amount of time to modify a theme or to provide an interesting user experience each time. Furthermore, a developer often needs to expand a current system by adding core components, to keep it updated, to bridge it with third party modules, to have it accessible etc.
Each approach is strongly attached with a customer’s needs, so there neither a solution that fits all nor a Swiss knife. However I would like to stress an issue which is nonnegotiable when developing a theme (or should I call it template? the terms tend to be identical according to the different packages) for a customer. This is design process or the design cycle. Among the several solutions mentioned above there is one that I didn’t cited on purpose. Expression Engine. EE follows a totally new approach to theme design. Many developers do not care to test a commercial product when there are lots of free. However you should give it a chance.
To put it simple, EE treats a page which is dynamically loaded as a static one. Which means one is totally free to design a whole different layout for it without having in his mind how this page is going to be loaded by the system. This advance which was described here a too simplified way, empowers the designer with a kind of freedom never met in other systems. On the other hand EE requires the learning of its special expressions, which are absolutely necessary in order to run it.
Other systems like Wordpress do provide a similar experience, but not so simply. To start designing in Wordpress a similar way demands a serious amount of time to decompose the way it works. Other packages such as Joomla handle the design process so dazzlingly that after some decent efforts you quit thinking about it.
All in all, we surely desire tools which provide as much design freedom as possible, simply because we already face known confrontations such as browsers’ incompatibilities. Furthermore, when a project runs for a real customer you have to measure the time for money parameter and take certain steps to keep it in control.
The other day I took a walk at websites owned by Greek companies which develop and promote Web Design and some freelancers too. The walk left me a bitter taste. In one word: we are not good web designers, we don’t design well. Get it to know bro: our designs stink.
I ashamedly discovered designs which were replicas of others. People who aim to sell themselves as pioneers do not hesitate to copy each detail of a well designed website and sell this work as their own. I have done this too and I am not prowd of it. At least I tried to alter the original design and above all I didn’t sell anything stolen. Now I am looking back at those so called works and I want to demolish them all. Fortunately, I have already done it to most of them. But you people who steal and sell your monkeys, shame on you. Now if want to stone someone, go ahead and stone me. This won’t make you less responsible for your manners.
People who call themselves educated have no idea about Web Standards. People who promote cutting edge design don’t know how to write a style. In general, Greek web design is of low level. Which is explainable if we think that the specific area is badly treated from institutions or companies. There are very few designers who do their work well and most of them have been trained or educated abroad. Greece is a country not ready to support our area and we must get used to it but not accept it in silence.
I have learned the hard way how things work (mostly by making mistakes like the ones mentioned above) and why we can’t design better. At least soon. Experience can’t be acquired easily, especially when customers or employers push designers too hard.
During that walk I also looked for a conference focused on web design in Greece. Nothing. A conference focused on Web in general. Nothing. I searched for any kind of organization concerning Greek web designers. Guess what… nothing at all. How are we going to evolve if there is no chance to do so? I have written it before: we remain helpless and still, while the world surpass us.
We should do something about it. So this is an open call to people who are professionally engaged to web design in order to communicate and see what we can do about it.
Website design solutions according to the highest standards
Solid Web development focused on your needs
Honest and crystal clear communication and support
How I work
The short answer is: professionally.
The quite longer answer embraces my passion to become effective and produce quality work. I strive for it because I believe that quality makes people stand out.
First of all I am all for interacting with you, understanding what you need and what you don’t. We together make a plan for your Web presence.
After the requirements have been set, design comes. Design, including the information structure, is not art. It is mostly about how to find solutions. I am focused on crafted, elegant optical approach, handwritten code and semantically correct content for all people around the globe.
The development stage includes almost any type or size of a website. By using the very best tools you can feel pretty safe about the flexibility, maintainability and robustness of your work.
Last but not least I need and care for honesty. Since I want to be trusted I engage open and frank communication which lets us both feel safe about each other.
If you are still with me you can take a look at my resume or drop me a line in order to learn more or…
Applying different stylesheets according to different browsers is a job I hate to do. However, sometimes you need to get dirty.
The following code is not exactly a hack but a combination of rules applied to a website according to different browsers and according to different versions of Internet Explorer (yes, IE is always the problem).
So I had a stylesheet which applied well to Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer 7, but not to IE6 or to previous versions. Let’s name it global.css.
Step #1
In order to hide the style from all versions of IE I imported like this:
The mediatype “screen” is the key which hides the style from IE browsers. However, the @import rule is not recognizable by all browsers, so pay attention how you use it.
Things are pretty simple here. The first line requires the old.css file to be loaded when the browser is not IE7, while the second one asks for the global.css in case that the visitor of the website uses IE7.
So now everything runs pretty smoothly and everyone is happy except for me who had to search for hours to find this solution. Hope you find it useful.
You realize that a product is good when you know the kind of it but the new one cames with a series of new features and it is supported by a well-known, trustworthy company.
You covet a product when the marketing behind it is so strong that you can’t resist it. The new iPhone is one of these. It is something you don’t want, it is something you need.
When you see it you feel you never had a mobile phone before. When you see what it can do you feel you never had an iPod, an Internet connection and so on.
A couple of days ago I received (at last) from Amazon the book written by Andy Clarke. I ordered it by the beginning of December ‘06. I have mentioned Clarke severaltimes in this blog and I am very happy mentioning him once more.
Transcending CSS is a diamond. I felt overwhelmed by the way Clarke treats web design and the inspiration I get each time I finish a chapter of the book.
The author focuses on advanced users. People who don’t know the basics of CSS might find it difficult to follow his pace. Andy Clarke instead of providing us a reference book he chooses to decompose a web project, no matter how sophisticated is, to all essential steps from the very beginning to the end.
The value of the book is not the new tricks it teaches you, but the holistic view towards modern web design it provides.
The book includes four main chapters:
Discovery (Semantics and correct markup)
Process (Prototyping and implementation)
Inspiration (Design ideas applied to the Web or anywhere else)
Transcendence (Advanced markup and the perfect design)
I still need some time in order to dive deeper into this sea but each time I turn a page I feel lucky I ‘ve found this marvelous source.
This post is an introduction in semantics and why semantics is important when you build a website.
Definition
Semantics is equivalent to meaning or to what is related to meaning. By using semantics in web design we make a step towards credibility. In other words semantics denotes: show what you mean.
Examples
If you were to write a book you ‘d use a big type for the title, a slighter big type for the name of each chapter and an even slighter for the title of each section of each chapter - right?
Suppose you want to transfer the same book to the Web. So you start with the title by using the <h1> tag, you continue with the <h2> tag for each of the names of the chapters and you move on with the <h3> for the names of each section.
Then you realize that the title of the book is too big. So instead of using the <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags you start from the <h2>, <h3>, <h4>. This way the title of the book looks better and the rest titles look OK too. It is a brilliant idea, isn’t it? No! This is a bad idea.
If you want to be semantically correct you must use <h1>, <h2>, <h3> series because the first heading indicates your main heading, in this case the title of the book.
Imagine the following example. You want to create a list, so you code:
<p>List Item 1<br />
List Item 2<br />
List Item 3<br />
List Item 4</p>
While the result might look the same if you code this:
the semantically correct example is the second one for the simple reason that the second coding indicates that what you have written is actually a list.
Why semantics is important
Semantics is important not because we help the human eye to understand us better (however it does help it), but because it permits the browsers, the search engines and the screen readers understand the content of a web page.
Part of the Web Standards focuses on semantics for this reason. If you want to help making the Web a friendlier place for everyone, including the handicapped people, care for the correct markup. Of course not all websites have been semantically coded (including this one). Actually, very few are. But don’t get me wrong. We should care more about semantics by the very beginning of creating a website.
Search engines care too. They treat the correctly coded websites much better than the rest. So if you want a better ranking, don’t forget semantics.
What about the headings of the first example? How am I going to reduce the size of the <h1> for the title of my book? This is why we need the CSS technology. A CSS can practically do everything we want with typography issues. So do the correct markup and then let the CSS custom the style of your heading.
Lanterna play “...music that will both soothe and gnaw at you.” This quote could probably be the best description of the sound that reaches your ears. Lanterna play instrumental music and the humming of Henry Frayne (the guitarist and composer of the group), is the only voice among the smooth guitars, the keyboards and the background ambiance.
So… I need one of these.
A couple of days ago I received (at last) from