A few weeks ago, I launched a little website I designed and built for Madden Raparees Gaelic Football Club.
My little brother plays for Madden Raparees so asked me to design and build something simple which could be updated easily. I had been itching for a little project to use Frog CMS so I got stuck in.
As I’m primarily a web developer these days and prefer to hand over the design work to others who can craft a much more beautiful picture, it was a bit daunting to fire up Photoshop again and get designing. However, I soon found myself losing hours playing about and experimenting. I forgot how much fun designing with a blank canvas can be.
It’s also quite liberating to be able to just push pixels about with a keystroke as opposed to having to code to make aesthetic changes.
In the end, I decided to go with a simple layout based on the popular 960 grid layout, supported with a large hi-res image in the background. I also took all the images on the site myself and was quite pleased with the visual impact given by the football in the background.
Frog CMS is very easy to install and hack around with if you’re competent with PHP and mySQL. Documentation is however limited, but it’s open and simple enough to allow you to pretty much manipulate it however you wish.
Frog CMS is open source, however active development of the core seem to have virtually ceased but a fork has been made in the shape of Wolf CMS. From what I can gather, this is where the magic is now happening and for any future projects, I shall be using Wolf instead.
I have now handed the site over to the football management and it’s been well received by the local community which is good to see.
The Internet is vast and the mind boggles about how big it will be in ten years time. It’ very easy to think, after toiling away for weeks, that when you launch a website, it’s gonna take the Internet by storm (Or maybe that’s just me?). Anyway, 99.9% of the time, it will not. It’s just a very small little grain of sand in an ever expanding desert.
In ten years time, will there be any point in making and adding new websites to the Internet? After all, domain names are already running out, where will we put stuff? How will anyone find it? Will the Internet be superseded by a new platform where all essential services are provided and the Internet as we know it becomes a graveyard of archives that people did in the nineties and noughties? Hmm.
Some think the answers lie in semantics, watch this great little doc to find out more…
This afternoon we launched a new website from BBC Northern Ireland, Science on the Ground. This learning based website is aimed at Primary School children (Key Stage 2) to Early Secondary School (Key Stage 3) in Northern Ireland.
We have tried to make Science more interesting by demonstrating how it works in the real world and industry. This is mostly achieved through the use of engaging video examples split into 5 main areas – Entertainment, Food, Flight, the Body & Protection. My particular favourite is on mobile gaming.
The website was designed and built by Bluecube Interactive. I provided technical guidance and consultation for BBC Northern Ireland. If you’ve got a minute, let me know what you think of it…
How we use typography on the web has changed massively in the last few years.
When I first started building websites, there were roughly 5 “web-safe fonts” and if you wanted your text to be accessible, you had to make do with those special five.
Things started to change a few years back with the emergence of sIFR. This was very exciting at the time as it basically meant you could use any font you wished on your webpages, providing the user had Flash installed. However, it was and still is quite buggy. If you wish to do anything other than the basics, it can be quite temperamental to manipulate to your needs.
More recently, Cufon has appeared as a worthy alternative to sIFR, circumventing the dependency on Flash and more importantly, Cufon is much leaner in page weight terms. It also very simple to use. This has been my weapon of choice for quite a while now.
However, Google has now entered the fray and made the whole thing even simpler. Last week they released their Font Directory which essentially means you can install any of their fonts in your web pages with two lines of code.
Google have taken care of all the display issues, even making all their fonts IE6 compatible, and wrapped them up in a nice little Black Box for the web to use. The library is a little limited at the minute but I fully expect it to expand with time.
I’ve used the font ‘Reeny Beeny’ for my header and navigation on this blog. To see hows it’s done, follow the simple steps from Google.
A few weeks ago, I discovered on the official Twitter Media blog that one of their developers had “scratched an itch” of his and coded a little script that allows you to embed tweets in your site like so;
This hasn’t been very widely reported as it’s not an official Twitter feature as such, it’s just something which one of their developers was experimented with and released on the Media blog as such. This is why it’s not quite as slick as it could be and why it will probably need some CSS integration work to sit into your site.
However, it’s alot more useful than taking a screen grab of a tweet for blog posts and as the tool for generating the embed code doesn’t obfuscate the mechanics, you can easily adjust the CSS to suit your own site styles.
Sometimes, things are so amazingly simple you wonder why the whole world hasn’t already been doing them before now.
How do you get the attention of top creative directors when looking for a job in NYC? Aside from buying billboard space across from their office window, you could do the internet equivalent for as little as $6.
April 22, 2010 at 16:06 ·
Filed under Social Media
Like many others, I was very intrigued by this mornings announcements by Facebook on their steps to venture into the wider web.
With over 450 million users worldwide, Facebook commands a vastly powerful social army who collectively have an unrivalled ability to seek out what’s hot, right now, on the web.
One of the most exciting elements is the ability to add a ‘Like’ or ‘Recommend’ button to your site.
This is linked to your Facebook profile, so that wherever this button appears (providing you’re logged into Facebook), you can just click it and this will then appear in your Facebook profile stream. This badge will also display if any of your Facebook friends have already liked or recommended this page.
After getting roughly the code I needed from the Facebook Developer page, I simply added a couple of PHP variables to dynamically insert the current page URL and then added the following code to my PHP page where I wanted the badge to appear.
For those familiar with CSS, you’ll see I added some rules to make the badge fit my site, you can fiddle with this as you see fit for your own site.
I have no doubt, there will very soon be a WordPress plugin to efficently provide this functionality but I quickly hacked together a solution to get the ‘Like’ widget you can see on this post (if you’re reading this on the front page of this blog). I simply added the following to the index.php file in my current theme folder.
If you’re reading this post from it’s own individual page, you’ll see a ‘Recommend’ button which can be achieved by adding the following code to the ‘single.php’ file in your current theme folder.
Discovered this sneak peek from Gizmodo earlier and like the look of the new iPhone indeed despite the fact that it doesn’t look radically different form the current incarnation. As we’ve seen before, Apple clearly heed the philosophy to innovate and iterate rather than try anything too radical. Makes perfect sense really, not like their current product isn’t selling.
I also very much hope Gizmodo’s prediction that one of the separate volume buttons may double up as a camera shutter button proves to be true as this is one of the biggest frustrations I have with the current iPhone.
Anyone can build a website nowadays, can’t they? Anyone who is any way tech savvy at all can knock up a website in a couple of hours and release it to the world in all it’s glory. There’s a plethora of tools out there too. Need a simple website? WebEden will sort you out in ten minutes. Need a blog? WordPress will have you up and going in 5 minutes. Need an e-commerce site? Business Catalyst will have you selling to the masses in 1 minute.
For the more adventurous, willing to get their hands a little dirty with some simple code, try Dreamweaver. It’ll cost ya to buy but you can have a 30-day free trial. Should be more than enough time to build your eBay, Right?
At a recent event I attended, one of the speakers was presenting his experiences on distance selling via an online store. One of his top tips was to “…cut costs and build your own website.”
I challenged him on this point and he argued that the website could be sorted out further down the line once the orders started to flow in. I argued that unless any new business has a substantial marketing push behind them, which most do not, they’ll have trouble getting anyone to their site in the first place, never mind converting them to customers once they are there.
To me, to not invest in a web strategy when the primary vehicle for selling your product is your website is akin to a butcher trying to sell from the field. He might have set up shop but who’s gonna find him?
I find that in Northern Ireland especially, there still seems to be a perception with small to mid-size businesses that a website is an afterthought. A luxury. Something to be considered with headed paper and compliment slips once the business is “on it’s feet”.
What these businesses fail to realise is the potential a strong web presence has to expose and advertise their business from the very outset. The Internet is not a passing fad. Regardless of what your business is, you can benefit. People don’t flick though a tattered Yellow Pages anymore for a plumber, electrician or garden landscaper. They search Google. Or Yell. Or Lookaly. OK, not everyone does but alot of people do. Certainly more than your business can choose to ignore.
In the “current climate”, with lots of talk of tightening belts, cutting costs and streamlining outgoings, many business owners could be forgiven for putting a web strategy on the long finger. But I would argue investing in this area could be a vital tool to help your business to ride out the storm. Sooner or later, you’re competitors will have a web presence, and it’s very likely they will take precedence above you if you’re not there first.
So, with all these tools available I mentioned earlier, why would you even consider hiring a web designer/developer? Well, perhaps as a by product of the fact it is so easy, there’s are literally hundreds of thousands of web pages being added to the ever expanding Internet every day. That’s a pretty big swamp to chuck your website into, in the hope it will bob merrily to the top.
This is when you need someone who knows what they’re talking about. An expert. No two websites are the same. No one size fits all. Your needs, and the needs of your customer are specific to your business and your business alone. You not only need to look at your website but the whole experience of your business in the online world.
There are many aspects of this to consider and to explain further is beyond the scope of this post, but I hope you get the idea. It is only when you address this issue can you attract visitors and more importantly, convert visitors to customers.
You may not need to be an expert to build a website but you do need to be one to build a successful website.
Today is the International Ada Lovelace Day which celebrates women in Science and Technology as she is widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer.
If you’ve ever been to a web/technology conference you’ll notice this trend of programming women did not continue as there always seems to be 20 men to every woman, so she is indeed to be celebrated, though many women have made a very significant impact on Science and Technology since, a few of whom are listed here.
Incidentally, I had no idea who she was until I found myself sitting in a meeting room in the BBC one day, named in her honour.
