St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Graphic Design’ Category

Today we announce a new theme. This one isn’t just a WordPress Theme, it’s also been ported form many other content management systems and even a plain HTML/CSS version.

Simple and clean, the Desert Sage Theme has two columns, has a fixed width of 1000 pixels and has clean color scheme of light browns. It has a Search Engine friendly text Headline and Tag line space in the header.

• Drupal
• Joomla
• HTML
• DotNetNuke

Support, download and preview links after the fold below:
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As web designers it’s important to see how your web sites and Applications will look on multiple platforms.  I recently developed a mobile web app and none of my previous mobile device preview tools included the brand new I Pad.    Well here’s one. It’s called IPad Peek.

I like to show this blog to people as an example of what can be done by a WordPress blog by themselves and what the next level of word press blogs is. That’s when a pro web design team gets involved in your internet marketing project.

For a while we’re going to illustrate this with a rotation of WordPress themes.

We’ll also give a quick first impression review (feel free to comment) on the theme and come back later and update our thoughts after we’ve seen them in use by the public.

We start the WordPress themes rotation with:
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Not exactly the way I’d do it but he introduces many important topics. This video also demonstrates how to use the Dreamweaver CS3 interface to create CSS rules.

Sadly he was wrong about the “Page Properties” they only apply to the page that’s open, not “every page that we create from now on” so odd that he got such a basic piece of info wrong . . . We try to actually put these CSS style rules that he’s creating in a separate ” style sheet (a text file, written with proper css syntax and uses the .css extension). Once this is done you can go to every page you have or create anew and tell the page to use the style sheet.

On a professional scale we use “Dynamic Web Templates” to force pages to use certian style sheets and accept changes made to a master template. Because there’s so much more to a web site than it’s CSS.

Every knows that Adobe bought Macromedia a while back. Web Designers in the know have always preferred Fireworks as a graphics and photo editing tool over Photoshop. Alot of Web Designers aren’t actually We Designers though, they are Graphics designers, who have had to adapt to web design. And they were taught in schools (since until recently there were no web design degrees) how to use Photoshop. Therefore they don’t even know about Fireworks usually. It’s one of the reasons you shouldn’t hire Graphic Designers to design web sites.

It’s true you can use Photoshop to make web pages. It’s true, they’re a couple things that Photoshop can do that Fireworks can’t. But there are so many things that Fireworks can do that any graphic editing software should do, that once Designers learn Fireworks, they never go back.

Anyway, the point of this article isn’t to rag on Photoshop (but if one knows both software the comparisons are inevitable, sorry Adobe fans, Photoshop sucks), but rather to say we’re all glad Adobe hasn’t killed off Fireworks!

I looked through Adobe’s web site (what a mess!) to find the “new” features of the latest version of Fireworks, called Fireworks CS3. Sadly they went all republican and most of what they are saying is new Fireworks already did, let’s hope they haven’t broken these features. The few things that are actually new are pretty self explanatory:

• Adobe Bridge integration

• This is a software interface to adobe resold and far overpriced stock photography. Don’t bother you can get the same stuff cheaper from the people who sell it orginally or even better, try istockphoto.com

That’s it, that’s the only actual new feature, and given its spammy nature I feel dirty calling it a “feature”.

Here’s what they say is new but actually already exists in Fireworks:
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This is a test of a new WorPress Plug-in called the Lightbox-Plugin. What does it do? It presents photos in the original lightbox script style. Which is to open a photo from a thumbnail without leaving the page and while dimming the rest of the screen.

Here’s the photo:

See I told it was a nice way to present photos! It’s easy to install, easy to use, and really does present photos in a clever and eye-appealing way.
A note on usage:

1. This isn’t a very effective means of displaying large sized photos either. Large size photos don’t fit on most monitors, and if it doesn’t fit, the close button gets pushed off the screen and Noobs (new users) get freaked out. We don’t want to freak out the Noobs do we?