Hello,
I’ve chosen to use Joomla as the framework for my latest project.
Being a Joomla novice I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t find it as satisfying as hand coding pages. After some initial niggles I now find it a pleasure to use, and I’m impressed with the power of the application. The support community is also excellent. In terms of Content Management System it delivers on every aspect I have yet found a need for.
The site should be ready for initial launch in the middle of January, and alongside Joomla I am using a plug-in for the e-commerce section of the site. The plug-in hasn’t been such a smooth transition for me, but is still impressive, especially when you consider it’s Open Source!
I would have thought that by the end of this project I will be very Joomla proficient, and can safely add it as another string to my bow. So if anybody out there would like a web site which they can manage and update the content themselves, but has no idea how to get it off the ground, I can confidently say I can implement it for you. Just give me a call, or send in a quote request.
Until next time,
DA
Hello,
I have updated the newsletter sign-up form on www.identity-thesalon.co.uk/form.php from a form that simply sent data as a continuous string of data, to data that is parsed by a little PHP into a far more readable format.
I didn’t do it alone. My PHP knowledge is still basic. It was adapted from a great little form written by Jemma Turner at http://www.jemjabella.co.uk/, using the excellent tutorial by the same author on http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/php_mail_form_secure_and_protected.
It has a few restrictions, such as lack of support for radio buttons, check boxes and drop-down lists. Or, at least that’s what is stated on jemjabella. I found it worked fine on drop-down lists, and with a little coaxing could be made to work “acceptably” on the radio buttons. It’s only the check boxes that elude me.
Until next time…
Greetings,
Earlier this week I launched the ”re-design” of the very first site I ever got published.
www.identity-thesalon.co.uk
On the outside it looks pretty similar and although there was nothing wrong with it as such I felt the code needed to be improved, and made a little more robust. It was a slightly prone to doing some odd things in IE6. The casual viewer might not have noticed the little wobbles, but I did.
I also wanted to improve the navigation within the site as sometimes you felt forced to return to the homepage in order to progress. Adding the drop-down menu bar to the top of each page seemed like the ideal and obvious solution. It also gives the pages a more uniform feel and is more graceful when clicking between pages. I’m using PHP includes to insert the navigation menu, which is a first for me. Having previously concentrated on the client-side stuff like XHTML, CSS and JavaScript I thought I’d give a little server-side trickery a go. I’m currently improving my knowledge of PHP and MySQL so expect to see some more exciting stuff very soon.
There is also a new “wicked” background.
If you’ve not read by brief summary of the site on my portfolio pages then I must point out that I am not the owner of the site in question. The owner of identity-thesalon.co.uk is a friend and he lets me experiment on him, or rather, the site. A virtual guinea-pig.
So long and fairwell…
Hi,
I’ve been experimenting with background “wallpaper” on my site.
And here is a little section of it:
A section of "80's Douvet Cover" background
I designed it myself using Fireworks. I used the Hex code for the main colour on my site (#6b5c52), converted it to RGB values and put it into www.colorblender.com. I then used 3 of the colours from the resulting blend and added a forth of my own.
It looked great in Fireworks, but when added as a background image to my site it was, shall we say, less than successful. I just thought I’d put it here as a tribute to a good idea, ill conceived.
DA
Hi,
Very exciting…
Just uploaded a new site to a clients server.
The 26th September 2008 shall be the birthday of www.greenchildofmine.com. May she have a long and prosperous life on the waves of the web.
I will move her from the “In Development” section to my ”Portfolio” shortly. I have much testing to do.
Until next time…
DA
Hi,
I’ve just finished some minor updates to the site that I think make a real difference.
I’d not paid too much attention to the art of typography before. Bit of a mistake I’m now thinking. I compared my work to that of some of the sites mentioned in an article on www.ilovetypography.com and was surprised not only at how much more attractive the page was, but how much more functional and approachable it became. It was starting a new project for a friend that got me thinking. I wanted the site’s pages to have a “good book” feel to them, so naturally I started thinking hard about fonts, and one thing lead to another.
So as a result I decided that I had better start by making my own site that bit more readable… And I think it’s worked a treat.
DA
P.S. the article by the way was called 15 Great Examples of Web Typography: http://ilovetypography.com/2008/01/02/good-web-typography/
Hello,
Welcome to my blog at DA77 Designs.
I am going to be the only contributor to this blog. Not very “Web 2.0 community”, but there you go. That’s the way it’s gonna be.
The main reason for this blog is so that I can quickly post any last-minute, up-to-date news online. As I am going to try and keep this as strictly work related as possible the news on here will subsequently be reflected in changes I make to my Portfolio and/or In Development sections.
From time-to-time the addition of a brand new page may first appear in its embryonic stages here on DA’s blog; before developing into a tadpole and then into a fully grown frog of a page.
I think that’s all for now.
See you soon.