Archive for the 'Web Design' Category
How green is your work place?
These days businesses not only have to provide needed services and solutions, they need to do it in an appealing matter. For most of us this “appealing matter” will include sustainable, viable, green solutions. Since 2001, Green Workplace has been working with organizations to track their resource consumption and reduce it. They’ve also implemented easy-to-use energy efficiency campaigns and delivered environmental skills training and education.
Located right here in Vancouver, BC, they are a great resource for small and large companies looking for solutions towards greener business.
Introducing Notch Hill Educational Products
Have you been searching for a way to help your child learn while playing a fun interactive game? Now you can, simply by spending just 15 minutes with Notch Hill Educational Products. These products are a great way to help your child build a strong educational foundation.
The products consist of a GamePak “The Nogs of Notch Hill” which is a learning program containing everything you need to help your child learn to read, write and sound the lower case letters of the alphabet and “Pam’s Patterns” which helps your child develop pre-alphabet learning skills, using simple pegboards.
Developed by Joan Thornton, these products were derived from a notion that children learn best whilst playing. While taking children for extra reading practice, Joan discovered patterns in the behaviours of the students who were struggling. She created games that practiced the skills the children were missing and began playing them with the children. The children loved the games, and began to learn fast in her care. Over the years she has given hundreds of children the gift of a solid academic foundation.
With the help of her daughter, Nicola Lott, the first Educational GamePak and a fun, informative website were recently released and plans are underway to create 8 more GamePaks taking children to a Grade three level in reading, writing and maths skills. Working with Nicola was very interesting and we wish them great success in their new business venture.
Free Easter Bunny Icons at Icon Dock
Just in time for Easter, Icon Dock has released a set of 40 free icons which you can use on your marketing material, blog, etc…
Check out their website for other great icons.
Enhance Dental Centre enhanced with jQuery
Unless your a web developer you might not have heard about jQuery. As defined in Wikipedia, “jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML”. Released in 2006, it’s use is very common on many websites, yet, I’ve never had a chance to play with it, until now.
Inspired by a beautiful design by Mizu Creative, my task was to convert the design into a WordPress based website enabling the client to make edits themselves and insert a series of slide shows with different behaviours. Converting the design into WordPress templates was a breeze, but finding a way to integrate the slide shows proved challenging. My initial thought of course was to use flash, but flash is expensive, annoying, hard to update and quite frankly, I don’t like it. I knew that Tzaddi had recently built a WordPress site where she used jQuery, so I thought I would investigate.
After a couple of Google searches, I found exactly what I needed.
InnerFade by Medienfreunde
The first demo I found was the InnerFade plugin. As the name suggests this plugin allows a series of text or images to fade in and out.
I’m not exactly sure who created this code, because my German is non-existent, but using his/her demo, I found the solution for one type of slide shows and used it on several sections of the Enhance Dental Centre website including this page, where you can see a series of before and after shots fading in an out.
Better Coda Slider by Remy Sharp
The second demo I found was the better coda slider. The aim of Remy’s demo was to look at the original effect used on the Coda site and improve on it. Once again, using his example and making a few adjustments, I was able to use the code and create a “slider” effect where users can view the various testimonials.
All in all, I’m very pleased with the final outcome of the site. What proved to be daunting and challenging initially, turned out to be fairly simple and I look forward to playing with jQuery on more sites. What are your thoughts?
Learn to meditate with Padma
If meditation and finding inner peace are part of your goals for 2009, you may want to learn from Padma. Padma is one of Canada’s most respected teachers of meditation and yoga. She has studied advanced meditation in the Himalayas of India for a decade, where she was certified to teach Sanskrit and meditation philosophy. Having worked with Padma and having attended several of her workshops, I highly recommend her teachings.
You can find out more about her retreats and workshops by visiting her website which we launched a couple of days ago. And if you can’t attend, you may also want to look at her DVDs featuring guided meditation, yoga, breath work, and Sanskrit chanting.
Animator vs Animation
In the web world flash is a bit like Marmite. You either love it or hate it. Certain sites do benefit from animation while others just don’t. Regardless of what you may think, you have to admire the animators who create this stuff. The following video is a great example of the creativity that’s out there. …And if you’ve ever had to work with flash, you may relate to the experience.
Enjoy and happy holiday.
Disclaimer — There’s an übber cheesy commercial before the video… Who comes up with this crap?
Web Directions North returns in February 2009
This year, Web Directions North moves to Denver Colorado – a hub city for many airlines, and a non-stop flight from all over North America. And the skiing’s not bad either. The conference is on February 4 and 5, with workshops on February 2 and 3, and the now legendary ski trip February 6 and 7, in Breckenridge, the most popular ski resort in North America.
I’ve attended the previous 2 conferences in Vancouver and would recommend it to anyone wishing to freshen up their web development skills.
Team BC launches new site
Every four years the Province of British Columbia assembles a team of athletes, coaches, managers and mission staff to represent the province at Canada’s premiere multi-sport events – the Canada Winter Games and Canada Summer Games. They represent the best in BC and are known as Team BC. The Team BC program is more than British Columbia’s best; it is also about building excellence. For some athletes, the Canada Games are a goal along the way to what they hope will be success in sport at major multi-sport Games including Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The previous Team BC website lacked in visual appeal, was quite difficult to navigate and consisted of old-style code which made for difficult maintenance. Working in collaboration with Miin from the Ascent Group we developed a site map, re-organized all of the content and created two new websites. Users wishing to know more about Team BC can use the main Team BC website while users wishing to follow a certain event or look at past results, can navigate to the Game Site.
We hope that during the Canadian Summer Games 2009, these websites will be a great resource to all of the Team BC members and wish them best of luck.
Help for Youth in BC
Bluelime has helped The Crisis Centre with their websites for years, including maintaining the Youth in BC site. Until recently the latter was easier said than done because the site was, well, a bit of a tangled mess under the hood. Little changes took longer than you might expect because of old-style coding. To the viewers eyes, it was visually overwhelming and not very user friendly. Given the number of resources offered on the site, and especially the potential state of crisis that viewers may be experiencing, ease of finding information and ease of maintenance are crucial.
Recently we designed a new site incorporating Youth in BC’s new branding and built it with WordPress so that staff can do most of the maintenance themselves. They’ve been receiving positive feedback from their audience, including:
The site is way better than the old one. Lots more info on so many things now.
…Which was music to my ears. It’s actually the same information, just easier to find. Mission accomplished 
The Pros and Cons of Content Management Systems
I read an interesting article a few days ago by Johnathan where he examines the dark side of content management systems – CMS for short. His arguments focuses mainly on the markup and the aesthetics of the site. Once the site is live and you’ve provided the client with the ability of changing content, images and copying and pasting from Word, then one must face the fact that it’s now out of your hands and God knows what the site will end up looking like.
I’ve been developing websites for over 5 years now and find it amazing how everyone now seems to want a CMS. Additionally with the use of WordPress, I no longer desire to create static websites. The issue that I have with CMS is that damn “copying and pasting” and I put 100% of the blame on Microsoft. Super bloggers and geeks aside, most people I know use Word to write their content and rely on it for formatting and spell checking. Unfortunately when it comes to incorporating it in WordPress, copying and pasting leads to strange formatting which ends up ruining the aesthetic of the site and adding extra code.