There are a lot of things I love about the web. Take for instance the availability of information or the relative ease of communication. I’m a web designer after all, so it’s only natural that I have an unhealthy obsession with all things world wide web. But even though I love the web like [insert whitty comparison], I come across a few things that really annoy me. Here’s one.
Obtrusive Advertising
Image from Engague Blog
I’ve been around the web long enough to remember a time before pop-up blockers. You’d go to a website and BAM! a bunch of windows would pop-up (or under) with advertisements for anything and everything. Sure, pop-up’s are still around but not nearly as prevalent as they were in 1997 thanks to the aforementioned blockers. I for one was happy to see them go. Nothing is more annoying to me than wanting to read a site and having something get in the way.
Of course, you and I both knew those crafty marketers would find a way to make their ads even more annoying. Case in point:
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I love a free tool. Especially one that is useful and creative. I recently came across a great idea from the good people at Rain Creative Lab. They have a concept under testing called the Paper Browser that allows you to wireframe your website using a sheet of paper. This isn’t just any old piece of paper. I’ll let them explain.
The Concept is simple.
A sheet of paper used for creating a website wireframe. However, not the same kind of grid that you might have used before. I’ve taken into consideration the actual viewing resolution of your potential user.
Instead of looking at your site inside the browser, why not look at it on what the user sees.
There are many advantages: you can gauge the viewing perspective of your user. Thus, maximizing your possible design estate.
I’ve provided guides for design that uses a 960px, or design screen at 800px.
The whole paper is proportionally scaled at 1024×768 screen resolution.
Your design canvas is 1024 resolution minus the height of the browser toolbar and status bar. The size has been properly measured to simulate the actual design estate you can work on.
Each grid is 32×32px in dimension. You can use this data to map out directly into Photoshop during production.
So that is that. They want a lot of feedback, so leave some comments or visit their site and tell them what you think. Huge thanks again to Rain Creative Lab for allowing me to share this resource with you guys. Download the files below.
August 27, 2001. For web developers, that is a date that will live in infamy. On that unassuming August day, Internet Explorer 6 was officially released. No one could have foreseen the headaches IE6 would cause for developers. Who could have known that in late 2009 Internet Explorer 6 would still have 12.1% market share, forcing us to make sure our sites play nice with it. There have been many attempts to bring down our foe (here’s one, here’s another), but alas, IE6 won’t go down quietly.
IE6’s problems are well documented, but luckily for us a lot of smart people have found ways fix (or side step) those problems. Here is a huge list of hacks, fixes, and resources to make IE6 a little less painful.
IE6 Box Model Bug
More than likely if you’ve heard of only one IE6 bug, the box model bug is the one. In short, IE6 incorrectly calculates the width of a given box causing all sorts of layout problems. Here are some ways around this annoying bug.
Welcome to my tutorial on How To Turn Yourself Into A Zombie.
Have fun turning yourself into the living dead. Please leave a comment if you have any additional questions or need any help. I’d be glad to assist! I’ve included the pictures I used for my profile picture in this tutorial.
Sample Images
Thanks to Cailyn Huston for supplying my profile picture, and Matt Sparks for allowing me to share this tutorial on his amazing blog.
Enjoy!
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PNGs have been around since the mid-1990’s and as the web has evolved, the popularity of this image format has increased. Here is a quick guide to the humble PNG.
A Brief History
The PNG was developed for two reasons. The first being that in 1995, Unisys patented the LZW data compression algorithm. This algorithm was used in the GIF file format. Any program used to create GIF images would now have to pay for the right to do so. Understandably, this wasn’t well received. [Here's a great account of the controversy]
As for the second reason, the GIF file format was simply outdated and needed a replacement. GIFs could (and can) only display 256 colors and have limited transparency options. PNGs were developed to improve upon GIF’s limitations.
Version 1.0 of the PNG specification was released on October 1, 1996.
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