Archive for the ‘Web Programming’ Category

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eCommerce

Monday, April 27th, 2009

eCommerce has pretty much been the bane of my web development existence since I really got started making sites. The problem is mostly that EVERYBODY wants to sell stuff online without realizing any of the costs or work that go into. I think a lot of people assume that online shops come at little no cost and then are just floored when I quote a price above $1000 for design, CMS, and eCommerce. In reality, $1000 is a joke of a price but it’s enough to dissuade many people. Clearly, those who give up on their store aspirations after hearing a 1k price tag were never serious in the first place- could you even imagine expecting to start any other serious business with less than $1000?

The real problem is that with each eCommerce job I don’t do I feel like I’m falling farther and farther behind, which is never good in the high speed world of web design. Are there any designers/developers out there who know of some foolproof, low cost eCommerce systems that can convince clients that spending some money is actually worth it?

Posted in Freelancing, Web Programming | No Comments »

More handy links

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

A very nice looking design gallery:
http://csscreme.com/

A gorgeous shopping cart system

http://bigcartel.com/

Just about every programming book you could ever want online, FREE!

http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/

Posted in Web Design, Web Programming | 1 Comment »

jQuery

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

I just started teaching myself jQuery about 3 weeks ago and it’s already slipped into just about every single project I’ve done since. My thoughts on this popular library are…

jQuery is AWESOME!

That is all.

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Fighting for CSS

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

It seems that now, the year 2009, in the world of Web 2.0, over 10 years after the beginning of CSS level 2, every website would be coded using this incredibly simple, elegant, and powerful solution to formatting web pages. Yet, my entire work history in web design and development has been a losing battle in advocacy of CSS use.

At my first positions at UWM I could understand why I was seeing so many awful table layouts and so little CSS – many of the sites were nearly 10 years old. The real shocker was that as I became involved redesign projects CSS still was nowhere to be found. I got used to this fact, and after a few years of working there, no ridiculous web practice could surprise me.

Or so I thought. Then I saw pages that clients attempted to make using Microsoft Front Page or some other equally wacky web page editor. Talk about overcomplicated, completely ineffective formatting code!

Then I started at Hal Leonard and saw the strangest combination of tables and CSS I’ve ever encountered. Tables galore, but with a different CSS style applied to every single table cell. Hundreds and hundreds of styles applied practically to every single sentence. No divs, no style information that spanned multiple elements, or you know, cascaded. Yup a complete lack of cascading styles when using Cascading Style Sheets.

I think a lot of people just don’t care or are afraid of using CSS. A lot of programmers don’t want to take the time to learn how to use CSS to align text when they know a font tag will do the same thing, even after I explain how you can use one line of CSS to achieve alignment on every page of your site, every paragraph even, rather than using thousands of <font> tags across a site. Others give it a try, run into some browser support troubles, and then revert back to tables, which aren’t even universally supported themselves!

Sigh.

Posted in Web Design, Web Programming | 1 Comment »

IE, tisk tisk

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

So, recently I’ve started styling my form elements on pages pretty heavily. It’s one of those last little details I realized I needed to perfect to keep improving my projects. So I happily went about adding background colors and custom borders to my input elements and all was great until I opened things up in IE and saw borders around my radio buttons and checkboxes. Well, luckily, only one google search and five minutes later I found this solution. Simply add this to your CSS to clear up those nasty borders…

input[type="checkbox"], input[type="radio"]{
background: transparent;
border: 0;
}

… in IE7 only. IE6, of course, still displays the borders.

After a bit more effort I found this link to a helpful blog about code that cleared up the IE6 issue as well with some fairly simple Javascript.

An annoying problem, but I suppose that the fixes aren’t too bad. IE, when will we get to stop adding custom CSS and Javascript just to get you to do what other browsers all can easily handle?

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Tricks I’ve Learned from Past Projects

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Somehow, no matter much I know before a project starts, something will absolutely stump me during development. As frustrating as this is, it at least gives me an opportunity to learn things as I go and always leaves me feeling better prepared for my next project.

Effigy – The lesson here is that complicated, non-grid designs are best accomplished with a huge background image on the page body. Do this, then just position all the text on top of that and you have a really simple X/HTML page that looks really complicated.

The Washing Machine Man – Ah, my first truly independent web project. This was the first time I set up a MySQL database and a CMS. Doing that seemed so incredibly advanced at the time but now it’s something I casually do in a matter of 15 minutes.

Institute on Race and Ethnicity – The lesson learned here was to not wait until a project is completely finished before going live, especially if there is a current site to maintain. It’s better to avoid waiting for months and just put up a site that’s 95% done.

North Shore Presbyterian Church – A lesson in creating unique menus through absolute and relative positioning is what this site was. Check out the art exhibit page to see what I’m talking about.

Discover and Learn – Setting up this site showed me how incredibly easy PayPal can be to integrate into a website. The code for the buttons is created automatically for you and they host the cart on their servers. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

My Music Site – This site taught me a lot about transparent png files. Achieving a drop shadow around a content box on top of a gradient is only possible using pngs, as are a lot of other advanced layout techniques. Using pngs is always a problem with IE6, but the Unit labs fix was a great find to get around that.

Maybe one day I’ll get to the point where I can tackle an entire project without running into a wall at some point, but from what I’ve heard from developers who have been around since the early days of the internet, there’s no such thing as a project without a ridiculous, unique bug.

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So Much to Learn

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

It’s absolutely alarming how many different programming languages one must learn just to work on websites. This fact alone has discouraged a few people I’ve talked to who want to start learning web development. A statement like “First, you absolutely have to master HTML and CSS, and then you should get very comfortable with Javascript, get familiar with databases and SQL, then start learning some server-side scripting like PHP, Perl, oh and some Java and .NET as well” is enough to scare anybody. The thing that frustrates me most is that the tough ones, PHP, Java, .NET, are all mutually exclusive. This means that you either become an expert in all three or only 1/3 of the work out there is for you. Right now, I’d say I have the first four, HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL down pretty well, and I guess I’ll just forever be a student to learn the rest. Sigh.

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Upcoming Web Design/Development Projects

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Now that I’ve done all that I had hoped with my sample CMS site, sample shopping cart, and portfolio redesign, I’m onto some projects that should be a bit more fun and a lot less work (hopefully).

To begin, there’s the Benno’s Bar and Grill site redesign project. One of my favorite establishments, a place renown for an incredible selection of craft beer on tap, it’s current website falls well short of giving the restaurant a good online presence. Nate and I offered to revamp the site at very little cost and plan to implement a brand new, modern design, an online rating system of the beers on tap, an accurate menu and specials page, and a CMS so that the owners can update the site content as necessary. Most everything is in place and we’re just waiting for the go ahead to put our new design online.

Nate and I also had an idea for a site called MyWikiTrail.net. The site would be another WordPress blog where we, and other users, will log our often confusing and entertaining paths through Wikipedia. The project will give me an opportunity to create a new design, work with applying themes to WordPress, and learn the WordPress end-user features.

Additionally, I am taking two new web programming classes this spring. One class is intermediate Java programming and the other is simply called “Advanced Web Programming” and will be a mixed assortment of database access, advanced javascript, advanced formatting, and more.

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Recent Web Projects

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Well, I always seem to keep myself busy, usually too busy. I really love nothing more than mastering a new technology or putting the finishing touches on a new design I’m really proud of, so working on new projects really has become quite an addiction for me. Actual paying work has been scarce, but I’ve been putting any free time I have to good use.

Over the last few months I completed a few projects of my own, most notably the redesign of this website. I took a long, steady approach to the site, working 20-30 minutes a day for about 3 weeks before I was finished with what is by far the best version of my web design portfolio I’ve ever made.

I also poured a ton of time and effort into learning all I could about CMS Made Simple. I set up a sample cms website to explore all of the features including photo albums, blogs, forums, comments, web forms, and more. I though I knew a lot about the system before this experiment as I have used it in 5 previous web projects, but now I really see the true power of it all. I cannot think of an easier and more efficient way for a client to maintain a site.

Shopping carts have always been a source of ire in my freelance experience- everybody wants one, nobody really wants to pay for one, nobody is willing to invest the time into setting one up. Therefore, I’ve never actually set up a full shopping cart system. Last month I took the initiative to just set up a cart of my own using Zencart. It’s not a fully functioning online store now, but I think it’s a pretty good shopping cart solution.

Installing this blog was actually yet another project, as it was only recently added- months after the initial site redesign. The purpose of the blog was to learn the ins and outs of WordPress so that I could have an outlet for delivering news and thoughts about web design and development.

Busy, busy, busy, and more to come.

Posted in CMS Applications, Freelancing, Projects, Web Design, Web Programming | 4 Comments »

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