Archive for the ‘Website Design’ Category

Smart Image Resizer (PHP)

In one of our larger projects, the CMS (Content Management System) has been designed to manage thousands of images and graphics and relate them to textual content. However, the design company has come up with a grid layout approach that requires all images to conform to several sizes to fit into the grid.

So far, we have employed someone to take every image and resize it to all possible image sizes that could be used. This process is lengthy and never ending as we continue to add more and more content.

So we were extremely happy when we found this PHP tool from the folks at Shifting Pixel:

Smart Image Resizer (PHP): a simple way to create thumbnails and more on the fly — Shifting Pixel

This tool is a powerful way to resize and crop any image on a website without actually modifying the actual image or tweaking code. Images are uploaded once at a high resolution and then they can be reused in any format just by adjusting a query string. When you have hundreds or thousands of images, this is a big time saver.

The Smart Image Resizer works with images in several formats such as JPEGs, GIFs, and PNG files. It can sharpen each image and crop them based on height/width ratios, color fill transparent GIFs and PNGs and features built-in caching to keep image variations for the sake of performance.

The web site has installation instructions, minimum requirements and a license to use the script. They have also posted some examples of how the script renders and resizes images in a couple of different scenarios. We hope you find it as useful as we did.

Our Top Pick for Web Developer Resources

In our day to day travels across the web, it is refreshing when we find a resource that overwhelms us with valuable, useful content. Hence the topic of today’s post on our top pick for online magazines, Smashing Magazine.

This is one of our favorite sites for many reasons. The quite often offer freebies in the form of icon sets, WordPress Themes, and so much more. There is so much valuable content on this blog style, online magazine, that a single blog post can’t possibly do them justice.

When you visit their site, start with the menu bar at the top of the home page and work your way through each item. We guarantee you will not get bored easily and the wealth of information you find will keep you coming back. One of our favorite areas in the Developers toolbox.

Leave us a comment and let us know what you think of their site.

Digital Web Online Magazine

The Digital Web Magazine is another great resource for web developers and designers. This is primarily because their content is updated frequently and relates to current issues and trends in the industry.

The main portion of the home page is dedicated to weekly updates, while the information on the right hand side relates to current events, updates and news which is, at times, updated daily. They also offer several methods to have a look back at the previous content, organized by author, date, topic, title or type.

This is a very easy to read site, and therefore extremely easy to navigate and find what you need. Their goal, as quoted from the About Us page states;

The idea is to encourage designers to be creative, developers to innovative, IAs to strategize, and overall be well versed in the web environment.

They certainly have kept to their promise and we feel this magazine is worth being added to a web developers arsenal of resources.

SDTimes Online Development Magazine

The online magazine SD (Software Development) Times is the flagship publication of BZ Media LLC from Huntington, New York with a subscription base of 60,000 in more than 130 countries. It was launched in February 2000, and has been followed by the launch of other BZ Media publications such as Software Test & Performance and Systems Management News.

This magazine is also available in a printed format as well as in a digital format, and is geared more at software development in general. But it still covers a lot of topics relating to online web development and comments on the latest news and events in such areas.

Another real asset that this online magazine has for developers in an online Job Board that seems to be very much up to date. Many of the job postings were for opportunities in the United States, but there were still plenty of postings in the UK and Europe, and we even noticed quite a few in Bangalore.

While one of the most Global speaking online magazines we have yet seen, it did fail in one small aspect of maintaining its global appeal. In the Events Calendar, there was an extensive list of upcoming events relating to the industry, unfortunately, all of the events we saw were in the US. Perhaps this is because there are so few events outside the US, but maybe this highlights an opportunity.

But this small item was not enough to deter us and we feel that SDTImes is well worth a regular visit to keep the most enterprising developer informed.

Website Magazine Online

This web magazine is available in both a print version and in a digital format. It is published monthly and requires a subscription. For those in the US and Canada, the print version is free, all others need to pay $49 or, choose the option to receive the digital version, which is also free. You may also choose to subscribe to their weekly, or daily updates via email.

The digital version of the monthly magazine is delivered in an eBook format, with the look and feel of reading a print magazine and is very easy to navigate. The site itself is chocked full of blog articles and forum posts to assist with the most difficult of tasks.

The team at Website Magazine has done a great job at managing that divide between the printed and digital world. We highly recommend this resource to all web developers.

PHP, AJAX Online Magazines

This is the first of a series of articles on online magazines. There are many resources out there for web developers, but we thought we would point you to some of the top content available.

The first magazine is actually a set of two online magazines; PHP Magazine for PHP developers and AJAX Magazine for AJAX developers. Both online magazines follow a similar blog style format and are kept current with the latest in tutorials and new releases for both forums. They both take advantage of their extensive network of sites to offer readers access to a wide variety of resources and other information that is very beneficial for developers.

Both magazines also provide access to an extensive forum for valuable interaction with other like minded developers. We liked the shop link provided by both site with relevant books from Amazon on related topics. But our favorite feature of both magazines was the mobile web page that both sites provided. The mobile PHP Magazine is here and the mobile AJAX Magazine is here.

We definately rrecommend both of these sites for developers who are interested.

IE Displays larger, low quality fonts & images

One of the most frustrating aspects of web design is ensuring compatibility across different web browsers. The most frustrating for our team to date is the issue with Internet Explorer 7 and changing the DPI setting of the display in Windows.

The computer is a Dell XPS laptop, and it turns out that the DPI setting from the factory is set to 120 dpi. While browsing with Firefox, the web pages looked just fine. But when we fired up IE and had a look, the font sizes were scaled up dramatically and provided a jagged, low quality effect to fonts and images. The easiest fix was to change the default display setting from 120 dpi back to 96 dpi. This maintained the web page display with Firefox and improved the IE display of the web site so that everything looked proper. But we can’t go suggesting that all visitor change their display setting before coming to our web site.

Just to pause for a minute, this DPI setting is accomplished by right-clicking on an empty space on your desktop, and then selecting Properties from the resulting dialogue box. Once the settings window appears, select the Settings tab and then click on the Advanced button. A window will be displayed that has a drop down selection box that allows you to change the DPI of your display.

This raised some questions;

How many of our visitors are going to be visiting the site and experiencing the same problem?

Is there a way to determine the dpi setting of a visitor and reformat the page so it looks proper?

Based on our research across the web, the good news is that not a lot of manufacturers ship with the display set to 120 dpi. But Dell and possibly Toshiba are among the manufacturers that ship units with this setting from the factory.

We also discovered a couple of suggessted fixes for this that can be inserted into your CSS or HTML to try and compensate for the change. William’s Blog had a good post on how to handle the scaling and sizing of fonts using a conditional staement in your CSS file. We found another good article at Leading Edge Scripts that provides a Java Script to insert into your HTML file to accodate for the issue.

Is this a hint of the continuing issues to come for Web Designers that want to provide an equal experience regardless of the users browser? Let’s hope not. We will continue to monitor this issue and look for other solutions. Until then, if you have a proposed solution or suggestion, we would love to hear from you.

5 steps for making your web site Global

WWW buildingLike many people that use the Internet, we have all typed in those three well known letters that proceed every URL. But most probably, we never give a second thought to what they really stand for or their true meaning.

Unfortunately, many web site owners do not give much thought to these three letters and this is reflected in their message.

Just for the record, WWW translates to “World Wide Web”.

When crawling the web, I am constantly amazed at how many people still present a message on their web site to target a localized audience. Forgetting completely that the rest of the world has access to the same message and at some point will stumble upon their web site.

Here are some easy steps to keep in mind to ensure that your site communicates a World Wide or global message:

1. Think outside your Box

When developing your content, think about the type of visitors you expect to have on your web site. But then take that a step further and think about those people, who are not in your local area, that also may visit. What might bring them to your site?

2. Talk to ALL members of your audience

Even if your product isn’t for those outside your local area, let those people from outside the region know that you have thought of them and perhaps post a link or two to similar web sites that cater to their region. For example, if you are offering localized computer support, you might want to put a small blurb stating that you currently do not offer service outside of your city … or to International customers. Your visitors will appreciate this as you have saved them time and answered that burning question, “Can I get this where I live?”.

3. Determine your visitors location

There are many free scripts out there that will allow you to determine your visitors physical location on the planet by their IP address, or that of their ISP. By determining their location, you can create and direct visitors to specific web pages based upon their location. These pages would then have a message tailored for them.

4. Communicate your plans

Many times, you may want to start small and grow to cater to a global market. If this is the case, let your visitors know your plans for the future and when certain aspects of your growth are planned to happen. This will bring them back to your site and allows you the time to develop your global markets differently.

5. Think about the language

Most people who use the Internet today can read English, but there are a large number of people whose native language is not English. It is therefore important that you write your content in a simple form and not use complicated terms and sentence structure. Even within English, there are words that are spelled differently, or sentences that are structured differently based on if you are from the UK, US or even Australia.

Some have asked if it is necessary to translate their web sites into a variety of languages for global users. My answer to this is “only if this make good business sense”. If you will be seeing large amounts of revenue out of China, hire a native Chinese person to translate and manage support emails in Chinese to accommodate these visitors. But, if you are a small site owner, the workload of involved does not add much benefit.

Keeping these few simple steps in mind will demonstrate that your web site is truly part of the World Wide Web.