St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

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Merry Christmas Everyone!

The Smith Family wishes you all a happy holiday season

This Christmas will be a special Christmas for me. It will be the first Christmas ever where I had my four year old, and my other two kids with me on Christmas morning! I’m all overjoyed inside!

We hope you get to spend some extra time with family this year.  We wish peace prosperity and happiness in the upcoming year.

View the new version of the Florida Photo Gallery

Florida Photo Gallery gets a long needed makeover.

by Texx Smith

The oldest of my oldest websites that still live is Florida Photo Gallery.  Photography has long been a passion of mine and this website used to be a source of pride for me.  The photos there were always nice, and the web site itself used to be  a thing of beauty and a showcase of cutting edge HTML and CSS technology.  It was one of the first websites in thew world to used CSS to create “rollover buttons” that used CSS instead of images to create the rollover effect and it also had an ingenious script that detected your monitor size and served a background image of a size based on the size of your monitor.  The latter was the forefathers of our much imitated,  Responsive Design technology in fact.

The new version of the website isn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it does use several cutting edge technologies which provides several features for us and the user:

• AJAX and CSS animated page transitions

• We’re talking subtle ones that work in any modern web browser, not the old school Internet Explorer only stuff.

• In an instantly (no loading time) appearing lightbox that automatically scaled to the screen size
• In a full blown article, for those who like to know the story behind the photo.

• Including a search feature, of course

Three reasons to use selectors as little as possible.

There are lots of articles on how to use selectors to apply styles to a web page.  If you’ve dabbled with this or viewed someone elses code who did this you know it can be quite complicated.   Most of thsoe tutorials and articles  missed a main point – WHY uses selectors at all?

Here’s why you shouldn’t:

1 – Breaks the rules – Selectors are based on the id attribute, each of which is supposed to be unique and not repeated. This kinda defeats the purpose of using CSS if your style unique elements regularly.
2- It messes up your programmer. He needs to use those id and name attributes for other things. He’s expensive. don’t waste his time.
3- It’s already hard enough for others to read your CSS without finding yet another place to set the style rules for elements. Don’t be a player hater and make it even harder for someone to find where you’ve applied a style, or part of the styles to an element.

Let's explore e-mail marketing delivery methods

When launching a large e-mail campaign it’s wise to ask “Should we use a company like MailChimp or Constant Contact, our own mail server or should we use a commercial e-mail server to send our mailings?”  Here’s your choices Mr. Executive:

• Your traditional E-Mail Delivery Methods
• A free e-mail account
• An E-Mail newsletter service provider
• Dedicated space on a private server

It’s good to ask this question and carefully consider the answers because there are advantages, disadvantages and risks to each choice.  We can’t give you a definitive answer that works for all businesses and all e-mail campaigns.  There is once choice that is more obvious than the others so we’ll start there. Continue reading “E-Mail Marketing – Service or Server” »

We recently been hired to pursue a group of professionals that is notoriously hard to connect with. Dentists. The client wants to keep the marketing strategy under wraps for now but here’s a screen shot of the web site.

For this web site, Texx mostly just put presented the right things to the right people, asked the right questions and pulled everything together. Others did the images, wrote the text and even decided what pages there would be. Texx had influence every step of the way however.

Texx says the only thing he did 100% by himself was the form and the strip of logos on the front page.  Soemtimes one of us will do a complete web site from end to end all by themselves, but usually it’s a team effort here.  Even if the collaboration is limited, there is collaboration.

You should loo for more work for his client in the future.  We’ve been hired to do a wide range of internet marketing, web design and technology work for this company.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to us.  That’s OK, we have so many ideas that we don’t mind if others pick them up and run with them.  Sometimes we actually want people to pick up our ideas and make something happen with them.

What got copied from us this time? Responsive Web Design in a WordPress website.  It’s the automatic changing of a single layout and server-side resizing of images based on the size of the screen of the users device.  This results in  faster loading, better looking web sites on mobile devices especially.  It also results in far less development time and costs for those who wish their web site to be viewable on multiple platforms.  To be fair, we weren’t the only ones who got copied, as we were not the original inventors of this technology, but we’ve taken the original open source code and turned into something special which has now lost a lot of it’s value.  Our product, still not released to the wild, is still better than WordPress’s implementation of it, but it will be automatically updated into every WordPress web site out there.

This will delay our project as we need to do lots of testing to see if if what we have and what they have will butt heads.  The Responsive Design technology was included in the latest update of WordPress (3.2).

Who copied it?  The developers at WordPress.  Who knows maybe they were working on this before we were, although they are usually pretty open about what they are working on and their was no mention of this new development direction that we picked up on.  Preliminary testing shows this update was rushed out the door and has adversely effected performance a bit as well.  We’re betting that will be fixed soon.

Are we mad about it? Nope. We think it’s a great move for WordPress and makes our WordPress offering even more valuable. We are also enjoying the fact that our mobile theme does more than the native Responsive web design in WordPress.

Are we worried? A little. It’s our job to find out what changes in technology will do to our clients web sites, web applications and/or data applications. And that’s exactly what we’re doing currently. This is a big change to the WordPress platform, but so far we’ve discovered the the extra effort we’ve put into great coding is paying off and there have been no changes needed to any web site.
We’ll keep you posted on that one.