Born and raised in the midlands of South Carolina, I've been working in the IT industry since 1997, and building websites since before that.1 month ago
Category Archives: Web Design
My New Favorite IT Training Resource: Lynda.com
I’ve got a new coworker in my IT department, and while thinking about his training regimine, I thought it would be really nice to have an alternative to the standard all-day, multi-day computer courses offered by our local tech training companies. I’d heard of Lynda.com before, so I decided to check it out. So far I’ve been very pleased!
There are tons of courses and software titles to choose from, and they are well structured, easy to follow, and very in-depth. My coworker is starting with the 2-hour long Microsoft Outlook course, and I can even track and see how much he’s completed so far. There are more advanced Outlook courses as well, and one for each version that we use at my company (2003-2010).
I’m also looking forward to (when I have some time) going through some web design topics, including Chris Coyier’s course on WordPress theme creation. Also there are hundreds of Adobe courses available, all of which I could use some work on.
Review: Handcrafted CSS
I just finished reading Dan Cederholm’s “Handcrafted CSS”. Great book, simply excellent. The way that the book is written gives the reader ample opportunity to understand some of the advanced stuff that Dan is teaching, but at the same time not skipping over a lot of the essential skills and structure that makes great web design. After finishing the book I immediately looked up some CSS frameworks and began to customize my own, based on Dan’s advice and examples.
Also, a thank you should go to Chris Coyier at CSS-Tricks.com for listing this book on his bookshelf page, I’ll be taking another look at the rest of that list now!
WordPress and Multiple RSS Feeds
This is a very useful overview of how to access the various RSS feeds in a WordPress site. I didn’t end up using it (yet) but had to research it in order to quote a project for a client recently.
Google Fonts
Another great resource that I’ve recently begun to use is Google’s Web Fonts service. Much like FLIR (outlined below), Google Web Fonts allows you to replace a specific text element in your site with one of their freely-hosted and much better-looking fonts. Check it out, it’s extremely easy to implement, and can bring a much more professional look to any site.
Using FLIR To Enhance Website Text
Today I’ve implemented FLIR (pronounced “fleer”) which exists just to make some of the text look better on my site. It’s pretty sweet, and very easy to implement. FLIR stands for “Face Lift Image Replacement, and basically what it does is assign the font of your choosing (in TrueType format) to any element on your page that you specify (Just make sure you’re using a font that allows you to use it on your website). As you can see, I’ve got it set to replace the H2 (article headers) on my page with a nice headline font, saving me from having to create images for each one!
If At First You Do Not Succeed
Over the last several weeks I’ve been working with Destiny Wenzel on the final tweaks and bug fixes on her new website. One of the bugs has had me beating my head into a wall (figuratively) because, as a photographer, Destiny wants her photos to look sharp and really showcase her work, but a few of the photos were showing some white spots where there should be solid black color. VERY bad looking, and very annoying to try and troubleshoot!
Wenzel Photography Launch
Last night I finished with the necessary tweaks needed to get Destiny Wenzel’s web site launched, you can check it out at WenzelPhotography.com and let me know what you think.
Managing Documents on our Company Website
This week I’ve been working on trying to find a new way for our company to manage the hundreds of PDF files that we provide on our website to our customers. Our current method of keeping track of and displaying these forms is through a series of pages with drop-down lists, each referencing a specific lookup of a MS Access database.
Getting Started
Hopefully this experiment will be good for me, but also good for others out on the net who are constantly looking for IT answers. I know I am, every day, and the more information that’s easy to find on the net, the easier my job is. So here I am, finally attempting to return the favor.