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We are proud to announce that themightymuggs.com has launched. For those of you unfamiliar with Mighty Muggs check out the site. Here is a pic of one of my favorites:
Also we helped put together 89 Mighty Mugg iPhone/iPod touch wallpapers and they are free!
We have just launched a new Valentine’s Day campaign for aHa! Modern Living. We took a few products from the Valentine’s day idea list and shot them in a few different environments and then paired them with some fun phrases. The photography was done by Ryan Rossman. Valentine’s Day is ruled by cheap and semi-pointless gifts so we thought why not take the gardening niche by storm and take some of the market share that candy hearts own.
Check out the aHa! Modern Living to see where the new generation will be buying there gardening products and in turn replacing the mail order gardening catalog.
This is a long time coming but we have finally released a new theufcresults.com. We finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and went with a much readable design. So when you are checking fight results or your UFC 93 odds you will have a much better reading experience because in this version we enlarged the font size and made the leading larger. That was a major issue with the last version. The UFC is one the fastest growing MMA organizations right now and we are proud to be producing one the best sites on the internet for UFC News and Results.
We are working on some great things over at Lightpost Creative. We are hard at work with theufcresults.com currently. We are preparing for the upcoming UFC event and getting ready to post all the UFC 92 results the night of December 27th. We just updated the WordPress install to 2.7, and it is amazing what they have done with all the updates. The WordPress team continues to impress.
Now that we have upgraded we are going to be developing a new look that will present the content better and create designated places for revenue generating elements. When this site was first created it was not search engine optimized but we are going to be reworking our content layout so it will be more search engine friendly. When the changes happen we will do our best to document them and report on what worked and didn’t.
I am proud to announce that Lightpost Creative is fully operational now. I am now doing all my business through Lightpost and if you are interested any design services please contact the San Diego Web Design company Lightpost Creative. In addition to our services our blog is also a great web and design related resource. We have posts up currently on why having quality web design important and a css image sprite tutorial that gives a step by step demonstration showing how to attain multiple buttons with graphical rollovers using the same image. All the custom web design services that are availble from Yellowbird are still being offered at Lightpost Creative so you or someone you know is needing any design work don’t hesitate to contact us.
I was working on babybag.com and was dealing with a php populated list of products. My first problem was a display issue with the right column in Internet Explorer 6 (weird, a display issue with IE6 ;p). IE 6 deals with margin and padding CSS rules strangely and often times breaks out of the set widths of the columns. The first step in fixing this issue was setting new margins on the <li>s that were being generated around the products. Here is one of the product pages so you can view the code if you want. Once those margins were adjusted and were spaced to look presentable in Firefox and IE I ran into another issue, this time in Firefox.
Some of the product titles were so long that there were too many lines of text and were preventing some of the other <li>s to not float correctly. The fix was very easy. All that was needed to correct the float issue was to set a specific height on the <li>s that wasn’t too tall and create weird spacing between the lists. Once the height was set all the elements floated correctly and the page viewed properly in both IE6 and Firefox.
Usually I avoid setting heights for the most part because I like my elements, especially with dynamic content, to be expandable. But since I knew that the titles on the products would most likely not push the <li> more than 200px tall I felt okay setting the height. If you have any questions feel free to send me an email, just use the contact form.
Every day I am shocked to find people still paying for or designing sites that look like they have time warped out of 1995 into the present. I guess I can’t stop anyone from designing in this manner but I hope I can persuade people to not pay for an outdated product like this. There is a lot that goes into a design and there will be minutia that changes from client to client but I have noted below 5 ways that are universal for every design.
This is where I usually start when designing from scratch or creating a solution for a client’s redesign. It is amazing what color can do positively and negatively. Every site should have a color scheme that matches the topic of the site. For example, if you are designing for a hospital you aren’t going to have a black and red color combo. You are going to have a lot of white and possibly a clinical blue or green to accompany. If you don’t feel confident in your ability to choose colors that compliment each other then let others come up with color schemes for you. There are two great online resources for choosing schemes at Colourlovers and Kuler.
I like to think of this like cleaning the house. When the dishes need to be done, your clothes are all over your floor and you have a week’s worth of beer bottles on the counter you start to feel bogged down and your house becomes less likable. This is the same with a web layout. If you have a cluttered site and people can’t figure out how to do anything or get to the information or service they want they will move on very swiftly to the next Google result. If you remove the clutter and make your content more concise and use space more effectively you will have a welcoming web environment and will please the site’s visitors.
I firmly believe in a strong visual metaphor. The look of your site creates the first impression. The old saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is derived from human nature. People are attracted to things that look nice and, more specifically on the internet, that are going to let them know that they have arrived on a site that has the information they are searching for. If you have a website that is about organic living then utilize imagery of natural looking farms, people and food. This may sound obvious but if you spend time on the internet you will see that not everyone gets visual metaphor.
Subheads can often be like the middle child in a family (no offense to any middle children out there). They get that syndrome where they feel forgotten and over looked. Subheads are important. They break up a page so it doesn’t seem like the content runs on forever. There are graphical solutions or CSS solutions as simple as creating a dashed line bottom border under an H2. Regardless of what solution you choose don’t forget the details of your design because things like subheads will be left out and your site will suffer.
Web design is art. Art is inspired. New trends don’t just emerge out of thin air into existence; they evolve ever time. Don’t be afraid to notice current trends and implement them into your own designs. This is especially important on the internet when dealing with clients. They see what someone else has on their site and say “I want that!” This is your opportunity to build on what others have done and make it your own. Quentin Tarantino has created much controversy in the film world because of how heavily he uses past trends, but there is no mistaking a Tarantino film with another director, he has built on what others have done and made it his own. This practice is necessary and without it design would get stale and stagnant, which is why some people’s websites look like they do.