This Is Only A Test…
Posted on by stevePardon the occasional weirdness. I’m trying my hand at building a HTML 5 template called BareBones.
Pardon the occasional weirdness. I’m trying my hand at building a HTML 5 template called BareBones.
The developer’s blog A List Apart has an excellent article by Richard Fink on the current state of Web typography–which is way better than the previous state of Web typography.
For as long as been developing for the Web, designers I’ve worked with have been frustrated by their limited design options, and developers equally frustrated by attempts to get around those limitations using image-replacement or Flash to control typography is ways that tend to compromise the nature of the medium.
But now that they’re competing again, browsers are evolving quickly and all of the big 5 (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome) now have “roughly comparable implementations” [Mr. Fink's words] of the html tag <@font-face>, which imports fonts from remote sites into the browser rather than relying on fonts already installed locally, which allows, in theory, the use of any fonts at all.
Only in theory, though, because even though they are comparable, the implementations are uneven, and, more importantly, there are substantial licensing and access issues to fonts–after all, font-designers to get paid for their work almost as much as Web developers.
There’s much to be worked out, but developers are getting board, because there is also much to learn, and the changes will make bor a better, more attractive, Web.
The guys at ColorPowered have created a terrific jQuery plugin for displaying images, one of the most common requests I get for presenting dynamic data.
Called Colorbox, the plugin does all the heavy lifting required for slideshow-type image display with many options which cal all be invoked from an unobtrusive JavaScript file.
I have a simple demo of one feature here, but a visit to their demo page to mess with the other options is well worth it if you imagine you’ll ever need to display image sets. Which you will.
The footer has been a neglected area of real estate on most web sites, but a recent trend towards more effective use of the bottom of the page[1] has really grabbed my attention, even though my focus recently has been on the development side of the design/development symbiosis.
I just stumbled on the design site Footerama.com that highlights the use of the footer for every conceivable type of important and consistent, but secondary, content or feature. It seems we are leaving behind, slowly, but doing it, the design-sense inherited from print media where the footer is treated as an annoyance that shouldn’t be allowed to take up too much room. now, many designers are treating the bottom of the “page” as a design asset, a place where they can park important stuff needed on every page without distracting from the page-unique content.
It’s a good development, in my eyes.
[1] It’s really questionable wheter or not we should be thinking of web content as pages at all, but more on that later, I hope.
I like WordPress, use it here and have done many installations and custom themes for clients. Although other blogging platforms are just as good and some, maybe many, people are better off using a service like Tumblr, Blogster, or WordPress itself, I’ve found WordPress hard to beat for both ease of use and ease of customization, and it is my first choice if a client needs a branded blog.
No secret by any means but mentioned less often is the fact that WordPress is also a pretty good platform for a blogless site–that is, it works very well for a CMS (content management system) for small sites without the need or desire for a blog.
Though less versatile than and enterprise-level CMS like Joomla! (for instance), the WordPress backend is much easier to learn, making it attractive for small, even brochure-type sites, for businesses without the resources to devote to learning how to use a complex application but who still want control of their content without paying a consultant (me) every time they need a change.
After doing it a few times, I’ve found I can create a WordPress theme in about the same time it takes to layout the page in HTML/CSS, so for little incremental cost ofer a purely static site, a business can maintain their own content.
Here’s an example I recently did for a friend: www.hardwiredconsulting.com. A couple of years ago I would have dashed off a static site and it would have sat out there on the Internetz growing moss, but with a simple CMS the site will be refreshed frequently and adjusted as business conditions change, all without paying a consultant.