Registrations are open for micro web design conference FFWD.PRO, the new fast-pace two days of top-notch local and international web professionals.
What makes it different from other web events?
We are keeping it small. Only 60 seats on the first day, and a small workshops groups of 10 or 20. We have a strange habit of asking each participant to introduce themselves to everyone in the room the first thing in the morning.
We are there for you the entire day, so whatever question you ask, we’ll be able to answer. There is plenty of time for every participant. We want you to wake up the day after full of new ideas.
The day one brings you names with the strongest portfolios in this part of the planet. Genuine producers dealing with real projects, real clients and real deadlines:
Expect nothing less than topics about inside agency life, what affects pricing, what percentage of work is actually showcased in portfolios, what can go wrong with the project and how to deal with that… or simply how much time does it take to create an extraordinary web site.
No theory bullshit, only pragmatic experience.
Interactive intimate workshops
Interactive workshops are held in two parallel tracks with tiny groups of 10 for Usability Testing Basics or 20 for Pro jQuery.
Bring your laptops and load your own project or current client work in a browser and update it instantly with what you’ll see and learn on the spot. We will be able to conduct mini usability testing sessions for a participants’ selected projects on the day or suggest user interface improvements with jQuery.
This is how-not-to make the first contact with a web design agency:
Promise more work later on, as a compensation for limited budget
Copy and paste response e-mail to competing agencies and forget to change the recipients name
Offer a share in a project
Not having budget at all
Promise more work later on
Instead of planning future projects and future marketing and future additions to the current project, it’s better to focus on doing what you do right now. And do it the best you can. If your current task is to create the best possible web site, then you better create the best possible web site.
If your budget is limited, do the single best thing that fits your money. A single feature done right is way better than fully featured nonsense.
Forget recipients name
This is obvious. For starters, stop copy/paste your e-mails.
Next, don’t collect proposals from many different agencies all at the same time. We are in custom tailored service business, not mass production. Many Most of us don’t copy and paste web sites, so we can’t provide you with a discount based on lower production costs.
Would you share your house with a tiler or carpenter who built it?
Shares only make sense if the project is something that attracts that particular agency or freelancer in contexts other than merely building a web site. If they find the project interesting, they will usually offer to do it for alternative kinds of compensation.
Not having money, only great ideas
If you don’t have money, earn it. Earning money actually helps. It puts you in reality perspective. Working (instead of dreaming) usually allows some room to rethink your next revolutionary idea.
If you have some spare money, buy Adobe CS5. If not, read on…
In my experience there are rarely features worth the upgrade in new software versions — take a look at MS Office. The flip side is usually bloated code, overcrowded interface and poor performance.
New Photoshop tools are mostly useful for repetitive tasks, such as removing stains on 100+ batches or image stretching. But seriously, how often do you need that? Will you now start working with crappy images, just because your new software allows you to fix it? How about firing a photographer and tell clients to send you their mobile camera shots? I mean, you have the software, right?
Does an actor comes to a set with filthy hands and after the shooting they force some unfortunate soul with Photoshop to make it award winning scene?
…
Large companies upgrade their software regularly, because of large multi-seat license discounts and perhaps to stay up to date with other businesses who already upgraded. And sometimes it’s the matter of a company’s public image.
However, for a small or tiny creative agency with experienced users (at least with regard to the tools of trade), new amazing “where have you been all my life” features are not really essential. It is much more useful to teach people basics about using computers, than to offer magical bullet.
With tough economics why not wait and skip at least one major release. Your business is not going to suffer because of it.
The latest technology doesn’t make a master. Skills and experience do.
For occasional photo retouching or web/UI design you’re quite good with CS4 or even CS3. So save your money and buy it on Amazon. They sell CS4 Student edition for under $400.
Recently we had a chance to re-code the old client site: Graniti-Sušec. The site was first developed back in 2003. and was in fact the first commercial (non-personal) site done with web standards in Croatia.
At that time I was much more involved with ASP 2.0 and only heard about PHP. But since then — my focus shifted far, far away from ASP, and we decided not to fix the ancient codebase, but to move the backend to WordPress.
With the migration, we had to take care about the new URL scheme. The language part of previous scheme was full-length language name and therefor clumsy. The transition had to be seamless, so we don’t cut-off visitors landing from Google.
The solution is quite simple. All pages are organized as a child pages of two parents: /hr/ and /en/. We created two additional first-level pages — /hrvatska/ and /english/ — and set both pages’ templates to “Page Redirect”. This is how it’s done step by step: Continue reading »
A nice way to manage articles visible only to registered users on your WordPress based site is to create one parent category exclusively for those posts and then create sub categories if needed.
Once you have the top, subscriber-only category, you will most likely not change it, and therefor you can use its category ID as an argument to construct your query, for instance query_posts(cat=-3).
This should exclude all the post from the category with ID 3 from the listing. However, this doesn’t exclude posts in child categories, and if we knew all the IDs, we’d expand the call to function like so query_posts(cat=-3,-4,-5).
In a real life, there are two possible issues. First, it’s a bad practice to rely on IDs for child categories, and the second one is that the default argument syntax cat=-3 won’t always work, due to plugins incompatibilities. Continue reading »
Here is a quick code snippet for displaying any given number of articles, related first by tags and optionally from the same category. This is by no means definitive solution, but might come in handy as a quick start.
Drop this inside the loop in single.php template, I suggest right behind the the_content() call. See it in action on the live site.
Use it as a base for more advanced features, or simply c/p. It’ll work :)
HTML5 is the buzzword this season. Leading people in the industry are using appropriate class names for what will hopefully once become fully supported structural elements. Fully supported = fully supported by browsers.
In getting ready for HTML5 instead of element header:
<header>Site Name</header>
you’d write
<div class="header">Site Name</div>
For the inclined readers, here’s the HTML5 working draft. Quick overview of the element list will help you catch the train.
Definition lists, rediscovered
Definition list is a personal favorite HTML pattern for marking-up 2 or more related content elements. I found it especially useful when nested in list-items on search results pages and various tag/category listings. This raised a lots of controversy in the past and is still raising today, but I won’t go down that route now. Here’s just a quick example, just in case you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about: Continue reading »
So here we are — Alen Grakalić of CSS Globe fame and yours truly — preparing for our first very own web design workshop in Zagreb, Croatia. It’s all new to both of us and really, really exciting — even though the first one is just a case study, an experiment — to see if we (and the market) are up-to the task. Continue reading »
Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana aims to connect the startup communities in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia and beyond!
Overheard: Seedcamp is a competition for prospective IT and web entrepreneurs. Each of first five teams gets an investment of 50K Euro — plus: three months of training and business development lectures in London, UK — held by expert consultants from Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Facebook.
Internet Explorer 8 is released last week. The IE team promised the browser will be more standards aware, similar to it’s major competition Firefox, Opera and Safari.
The trouble is — designers and developers don’t settle for current minimum, we are always into something new. So, by the time a giant vendor locks the feature list, a more flexible and agile competition goes miles away.
In the era of rounded corners/borders and transparency made possible purely with CSS, IE team missed to implement both, or at least in the form that wouldn’t require separate style-sheets files to conform to W3C guidelines.
I checked a few dozens of CSS-based web sites, and I’m not even sure anymore if everything works because developers payed special attention to IE 6 and IE 7, or is it because IE 8 is mature enough to render CSS layouts properly.
What works, what isn’t working
PNGs work without hacking. Rounded corners with CSS not. Text shadow — no. Alpha transparency is still possible only with proprietary filter property, for instance filter: alpha(opacity=10);.
The old typeface order bug is still present, and easy font embedding with @font-face doesn’t work either, so if you prefer this method, read how to do it in IE.
