Why Am I Me?

Daunt Books Screen Shot

It’s been a long time in the making, just over 3 years to be precise, but my latest design for Ehaus,  the Daunt Book website, has finally gone live. Some elements of the user interface are quite different to most bookshop websites and on the whole I think they work well.

They’ve also made a commendable effort to create their own bibliographic data for the books, largely the reason the site has taken so much time to develop.

Iphone Screen Shot

Just created a Mobify.me version of the blog. I found it easy to use, interfaces pretty well with Wordpress.

Policy Press screen shot

My latest work for Ehaus, The Policy Press web site. We also made a Wordpress blog for them.

Screenshot of the new Ehaus website design

Been working away on a new design for the Ehaus website over the last couple of months and am pleased it has now launched. Pretty happy with this one, and a definite improvement on the last design, some nice jQuery touches and I think it showcases what we do really well.

Screen shot of colorbox pop-up window

I came across a lightbox style plugin for jQuery called Colorbox, developed by a designer/developer called Jack Moore over at Colorpowered. It looks great, there are some nice parameters that you can set, I especially like the fixed width or height, and you can also include video, external and inline content as well as other sites in an iframe.

I’ve looked at lots of different variations including Fancybox, Greybox, Thickbox as well as Lightbox itself but I think this one is the best I’ve seen.

It is also released under the MIT License. Good work Jack!

Browser Pain - IE Testing

Microsoft has released some new software that will be of interest to fellow web designers and developers out there, a programme called SuperPreview.

It’s a standalone application (in beta at the moment) that enables you to see how your websites will look across different versions of Internet Explorer without having to set up a Virtual Machine to run IE6, or another computer dedicated to running IE6.
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My latest work for Ehaus, the Galaxy British Book Awards website.

The 2009 Nibbies Web Site

Some nice touches on this site, plenty of jQuery on the front page including an image rotator, an accordion and a carousel. There’s also a pop-up box for embeded video files. I also set up a blog for the award.

PS. Guardian launches Open Platform, enabling users to build applications with the Guardian.

Death to IE 6

Got an email from iStockphoto today saying they are withdrawing support for Internet Explorer 6 from 2010. This reminded me of a statement I read from 37signals some months ago that they were phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6. I read this initial article with much interest as this browser causes me an enormous amount of stress, unbelievably however, it still has a market share of around 20%, although I wouldn’t be surprised if half of that is developers and designers looking at page views over and over until they’ve fixed a problem.
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jFlow Screenshot

Have been on the look out for a nice jQuery image transition effect and came across this great article, 57+ Free Image Gallery, Slideshow And Lightbox Solutions over at 1stwebdesigner.com.

Two I really liked were s3Slider and jFlow, I think I’m going to use the s3Slider one on a project I’m working on.

P.S. There’s a new Firefox add-on for Firebug called FireScope from the people over at SitePoint
P.P.S. Microsoft has unleashed Release Candidate 1 of  IE8.

I’ve been using Adobe (and Macromedia) products ever since I started designing websites nearly a decade ago. I actually started learning web design by learning to write HTML but, with the increasing complexity of creating layouts using nested tables, it became much easier to use a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver. About 4 or 5 years ago I started creating websites using CSS based layouts and the need for a WYSIWYG editor began to seem unnecessary. I also do most of my debugging by using the Firebug plugin for Firefox.
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