Author: djbrensinger Page 37 of 50

Spice up a light content website

On October 27, 2012

Does your website have light content and no photos? What is light content? A site that doesn’t have much to say. Your pages may have less than 300 words on them. According to Yoast’s SEO Plugin for WordPress, 300 words is a good number to have on a web page.

What can you do to improve the site?

You need to jazz up the site. One way is to add more photos. Be creative. Photos can help to convey what your company’s products or services are about. With products, you can show them out of the box and being used by a person. If you are selling services, you can demonstrate your services by using photos of your staff or stock photos. For example a client does property maintenance for local homeowners and rental properties, I took a few photos of painting supplies, measuring tape and a toolbox with tools. These photos were adding to help demonstrate a few services that the company provides.

You can also add social media, videos and a way to schedule appointments. In Creating more purpose for content-light websites, Kendra Gaines explains how to make your website more interesting so people will return or suggest your site to friends. This can be a challenge when your site isn’t a blog or magazine.

5 Tips on Responsive Design

By djbrensinger

On September 17, 2012

In Design, Web Development

Responsive web design allows you to make your websites easy to read at different device sizes. This short collection of 5 articles helps you to keep your responsive designs from being boring, let visitors opt-out of “mobile” sites and apply tricks and templates to achieve responsive design.

Is Responsive web design boring? Jonathan Longnecker of FortySeven Media believes that responsive design can lead to boring web sites.
He explains his argument and provides tips on how to make sure that these sites aren’t boring.
What if your visitors want to Opt-out of your Responsive Design? For some sites, responsive design lets them read the site quickly and easily. If they need to do something quickly, a responsive design may get in the way. CSS-Tricks.com shows you how to let your visitor choose to go to a “full site” version of your site.
Responsive Design Changes Your Workflow. It forces you to change how you approach building web sites. You have to think about designing for various sizes and how your design fits together like puzzle pieces inside of one whole piece. Luke W. shares his notes from An Event Apart on Responsive Design.
Web Designer Wall’s 5 Useful CSS Tricks for Responsive Design shows you 5 commonly used CSS tricks for coding responsive design. Tricks that include Responsive Video, Min and Max widths, relative values and more.
Looking for some inspiration on designing Responsive web sites? Speckboy has 20 Free Responsive Web Design HTML & CSS Templates. This templates can be use on static websites or with a CMS. They can also be used be designers to learn how to create responsive designs.

3 Background patterns taken with a cellphone

By djbrensinger

On August 31, 2012

In Photography

As a developer and photographer, an android phone makes it easy to capture photos wherever you are. You don’t need to remember to take your camera with you because it is always with you. When you find inspiration, you can take a photo. Great photos can happen with a cellphone. You can master cellphone photography.

Bright Light

Most photography tips tell you to get the lighting right. Bright light can make your photo look washed out. You can still get good photos at noon. I got this green leaf when walking at lunch. In this case, the shade of the building helped to minimize bright light of the sun.

Green Leaf with Stripes

Color Variations

The shade of a tree helped to create the variations in color for this metal grate. When the sun breaks through the leaves in the tree, it creates a bright pattern of its own on the grate. You can also see the effect of our weather on metal.

Grate in Waukesha

Texture

This tree has bark that grows in an interesting pattern. Unlike the other trees in the park, this tree’s bark grows in thin strips and seems to separate. Even though the picture was taken at noon, the shade of the tree helps to minimize the sun’s glare and show the unique pattern of the bark.

Bark

Any photo that you take with your cell phone can be a potential background pattern for a web project or shared on the web for others to enjoy. As cellphones become handy replacements for camera, more people can publish their photos on flickr and other photo sharing sites. If you want to do more, you can look for contests or exhibits that focus on cellphone photography.

5 Development Tips for You

By djbrensinger

On July 31, 2012

In Programming, Web Development

As a developer, I look for tips that can help with problem-solving to picking a language for my next project. Here are 5 development tips to help you be a better developer:

The “Just look at it” hack to problem solving When you have difficult problems, sometime you want to just sleep on it. Dave Lee suggests that you “Just look at it”. Don’t try to solve it. Stare at it for a while and see what ideas you come up with. He lists the steps that you can use to try this type of problem-solving.
Productive Procrastination When you just can’t focus and need a break, you can either force yourself to finish a demanding task or take a break. Productive Procrastination shows you how to switch to less demanding tasks like checking out what people are saying about your company on Twitter or reading a blog related to your industry.
10 things web developers must know to become truly amazing To be a great developer, you need to know more than code. Here’s Dan Frost’s list of things you need to know.
How to pick the right programming language A programming language is like a tool. Not every tool is suited to complete the project or problem that you want to solve. Mashable lists which languages are better suited to a particular industry.
Don’t be afraid of imperfection Perfection can be stifling. It can cause you to procrastinate or never complete a project. When you create an app, users don’t care if the code is perfect. They just want it to work. Amber shares why you shouldn’t be afraid of weird looking code in your next project.

Creating a web button using vintage design

By djbrensinger

On July 7, 2012

In Design, Web Development

For Burlington Footwear’s website, the client wanted an old-fashioned or vintage look. I applied this design style to a button that opens the shoe club page. Vintage Design uses dark or muted colors, descriptive or cursive fonts, textures and graphics specific to your selected time period. BFW Shoe Club

To create this look, I made the following choices:

I created a background with a vintage paper look. It combines the colors yellow and green to make it look aged. Then, I added a paper texture to complete the look. I used this Fireworks tutorial to create a vintage (old) paper look.
Vintage Design uses descriptive or cursive fonts. Burlington Footwear already uses a script or cursive font in its header. For consistency, I chose to reuse the font.
Burlington Footwear’s website uses red and green. I choose a dark green and red because Vintage Design uses dark, muted colors. These darker colors were applied to the font and outline of the button.
Vintage Design also includes using images specific to a selected time. I used the old-fashioned shoe from the logo. Since the shoe image is specific to an older time, it made sense to add it to the button. I just blended it into the background and repeated the shoe for balance.

By combining these elements together, they help to achieve the vintage look that the client was looking for.