Graphics and Design Discussion - WebProWorld

LiteBox Activation When Page Loads

morestar — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:35:03 GMT

So I'm trying to make a registration form for a client who wants the form to open up in a litebox - for those who don't know what the litebox is, it's usually used in image galleries - when a user clicks on one of the images, it pops up with 'next' and 'previous' buttons and allows you to browse through all the pictures in the gallery...

the site that let's you download the script and see an example is here:
Lightbox 2

BUT! I have seen a few sites that use that functionality for other purposes - namely the one I am trying to achieve today - where when a user gets to a page, the page blackens out (dims to black), you can still see the page but a litebox opens with content in it.

I think I can figure out how to get the content rather than an image to display in the litebox but I need it to activate when the page loads...if anyone knows of this hack let me know.

Thanks everyone...

video diary ideas and editor needed

inertia — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:32:26 GMT

Hi people. I'm heading off round the world very soon and would like to create some sort of cool video diary made up of pics, small video clips, music etc. Obviously i could go for something like windows movie maker but on examination and a bit of playing around it looks pretty limited. Particularly with the audio editing side of things.

Can anyone recommend an alternative (which is preferably free) or does anyone have any recommendations, links or suggestions on how to improve the quality of videos which end up on youtube?

Cheers

All web developers are Cowboys?

nigeltpacker — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:45:06 GMT

Latest research indicates that web designers are cowboys. Is this true?

What is the perception of business owners of the web design industry and why do they see it as filled with cowboys and rogues?

Are all web developers cowboys?

The outcome of research into the industry from internet marketing consultancy Business for Business who have been researching the subject for the last three years.

Their book Internet Marketing How to get a Website that Works for Your Business, was one of the outcomes of the research and has assisted thousands of marketing executives and web designers since it was published in the last half of 2008.

Read the article.
Internet Marketing articles by Nigel T Packer, author and internet marketing consultant

What is your experience?

Web Forms & Pop-up blockers

Clint Neilsen — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:30:32 GMT

The number of customer contacts indicating that they can't use our forms because of their security settings has increased.
I've seen a number of sites offering tutorial information on how to set their spam filters toallow pop-ups, however we would like to offer our forms in the parent window to ensure nothing is missed.
Would anybody know of any major websites that have built their forms like this? Or any articles on best practice to mitigate forms being blocked by spam filters?

Problems with Fireworks into Dreamweaver

jessmmorrow — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:05:30 GMT

Hi i am a student and I am trying to work on a project. I know it is not totally important to a real life job, but I was hoping I could receive some help. I am creating a bike website and created a template in fireworks that has the background logo, roll over text and drop down menus on some. It is a png file and is in my file in dream weaver, but it won't let me import or place it into it, an error code is through something about being unbalanced. If i drag and drop the buttons don't work. What do i do or what am i doing wrong? please help!

Jessica

Is HTML 5 established enough to begin using?

weegillis — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:04:28 GMT

How close is HTML 5 to becoming a fully supported spec? Will we need to create 'fall back' pages and sniff for supported environments?

?

weegillis — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:03:37 GMT

Does anybody know how well supported is for attributes other than "icon" and "stylesheet"?

HTML / XHTML : HTML link rel Attribute

HTML 5 : HTML 5 link Tag

What to charge for additional pages?

vfaulkner — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:59:50 GMT

I created a website for a photographer client, for which I was paid my standard flat business rate that includes minor updates.
Now, the client wants to add image gallery pages to the site and wants a quote to do the work. This may be an ongoing assignment; she is not sure yet if she wants 5 pages or will need 20+ for her pics.

My question is: Should I charge her a flat fee, hourly, or per page basis?

I know I could make a 'template' to input images into to make the process easier, but there still the image manipulations, tags, text, etc., to deal with.

I don't want to price myself out or undervalue anyone's work.

Latest verdict on left vs. right navigation?

johnnygphotography — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:24:07 GMT

I'm going to be building a couple of sites using Wordpress and have going through their themes. Most of the two-column themes have the navigation on the right-hand side. I've normally built sites with the horizontal navigation at the top or the vertical navigation on the left-hand side.

Is right-handed navigation becoming more acceptable/common? I'm still under the impression (old-school, maybe?) that the left or top navigation is more user-friendly because that's what the visitors are used to.

These site I'm building are more informational/presentational and not for e-commerce...

Your thoughts?

Thanks!!!

Membership Management

Orion — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:39:26 GMT

Hi all,

Wanted some feedback best scripts and platforms etc...

Our Cottage Association wants me to redo the website..

We want to be able to allow members (700 +) to login and renew their membership each year (paypal or mail-in)
Manage member information (name / address / phone / email)
Send out newsletter and other information
Photo gallery / youtube vid gallery
If it lent itself to a small community style (each member has a page) we can work with that too but not necessary
Executive to login and edit specific pages only
set up polls for general membership
Extensible through plugins would be nice eg. discussion forum and more
allow for customization of design fairly easily...

I love wordpress but haven't found a module to handle the membership area yet. Joomla and Drupal are other options..

We do NOT want to have our member database hosted (SAAS) we want a script and will pay (a bit) if needed.

As always I greatly appreciate the feedback et al from everyone!

Thank you!

Simple Question ... or is it?

Dinghus — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:22:19 GMT

When you come across pagination would you rather have the ability to jump to any page or just to the next page (forward and back)?

I'm working on a shopping site and the question is if there are like 30 pages, do I put in a link for previous page and next page only or put in like links for a whole bunch of pages (1 2 3 .... last )

If you are at all curious about the site you can see it at DonOmall - Your one stop shopping site

Functionality can be commented on but there is no design work done on it yet. Even the logo is just a slap up job from an online free logo generator. :)

Problems with IE Rendering

theoart — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:03:27 GMT

I am running into a problem on a site redesign I am doing with getting the page to render the same in both IE as well as FireFox. I was given the diced up version of a Photoshop file which had been converted to an html document. The html uses mainly css with div tags which I assume would the the better option over tables but once I started to pluging in dynamic content from a backend database, it "broke". Originally the static html file worked fine in IE but now when viewing in Internet Explorer everhthing shifts to the left and the footer is no longer visible. I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong since the content I was plugging in did not have any html in it that I caould tell. It looks okay in FireFox, and I am sure okay in Safari but IE is not liking it at all.

The link is below:
San Antonio Weddings
Any help will be appreciated.

so many browsers, local setting problems:(

ristenk1 — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:02:38 GMT

I feel like I'm back to square one although I changed all of my fonts to px so that when they are zoomed in it doesn't break the design. I'm going to try and paste a screen shot of my problem. I have checked this site on different browsers and operating systems... and it has worked but it is just not working on my clients computer and it is driving me crazy because I don't know if it is a local setting (it must be because they use firefox version 3.5.3 on a windows xp version 2002, with no zoom and it should work on that!) It looks like the font that I set in px (which is being controlled by h1, h2 etc) is being increased...but how could this be? I know the client did not change the size of text on their operating system nor in their browser - through tools and options - so how could this be?

Thanks!

...can't paste screen shot...ok, so problem is just that the text is being displayed bigger on my clients computer and I checked their zoom and it is normal...can't figure out what else it could be:mad:

html:

A Year Round Tree Expert Company provides full service tree care:

Tree and Shrub Removal

Pruning and Trimming

Stump Grinding

Storm Damage Service

Insect and Disease Diagnosis Treatment

Fertilization

Storm Removal Service

Commercial & Residential

css:

html {
height:100%;
margin:0;
padding:0;
}

body {
background-color:#13882D;
background-image:url(Redone/images/background1.png);
background-repeat:repeat-x;
height:100%;
margin:0 auto;
padding:0;
text-align:center;
}

#holder {
background-color:#FFFFFF;
border:medium none;
height:744px;
margin:0 auto;
padding:10px;
position:relative;
text-align:left;
width:800px;
}

#ayearround {
color:#128F33;
font-family:Helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
font-size:20px;
left:40px;
position:absolute;
top:120px;
}

#treeexpert_etc {
color:#128F33;
font-family:Helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
font-size:20px;
left:40px;
position:absolute;
top:140px;
}

#proudly_etc {
color:#128F33;
font-family:Helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
font-size:18px;
left:288px;
position:absolute;
top:100px;
z-index:53;
}

#phone_middle {
color:#128F33;
font-family:Helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
font-size:20px;
left:380px;
position:absolute;
top:105px;
z-index:54;
}

#phonenumbers {
color:#828181;
font-family:Helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
font-size:9px;
left:672px;
position:absolute;
top:11px;
}

#logo {
left:48px;
position:absolute;
top:11px;
}

#home1 {
font-size:16px;
left:225px;
position:absolute;
top:70px;
}

#services1 {
font-size:16px;
left:310px;
position:absolute;
top:70px;
}

#ourwork1 {
font-size:16px;
left:410px;
position:absolute;
top:70px;
}

#whoweare1 {
font-size:16px;
left:510px;
position:absolute;
top:70px;
}

#contact1 {
font-size:16px;
left:615px;
position:absolute;
top:70px;
}

#horizontal_line {
left:170px;
position:absolute;
top:86px;
}

#picture {
left:80px;
position:absolute;
top:180px;
}

img {
border-style:none;
}

a {
color:#128F33;
text-decoration:none;
}

#copyright {
left:650px;
position:absolute;
top:752px;
}

#home2 {
left:13px;
position:absolute;
top:742px;
}

#services2 {
left:56px;
position:absolute;
top:740px;
}

#ourwork2 {
left:119px;
position:absolute;
top:742px;
}

#whoweare2 {
left:195px;
position:absolute;
top:739px;
}

#contact2 {
left:283px;
position:absolute;
top:740px;
}

#blog {
left:353px;
position:absolute;
top:740px;
}

.treeservice {
font-size:20px;
}

WebProWorld Halloween Photoshop Contest!

rah — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:26:22 GMT

It's time for our annual Halloween contest!

As many of you know, at this time of year we do our annual Halloween Photoshop contest. For your stock images I'm providing links to pictures of a few of us here that work for iEntry (parent company of WebProWorld). Let's see you do your worst with our pictures.

As with all things on here there are a couple rules to follow:

1) Keep it clean. Nothing suggestive or offensive.
2) Have fun.

We'll also be giving away a special prize this year in addition to having your website featured in our WebProWorld Newsletter.

Our Contest will end next Friday, October 30, 2009 at 12:00pm (Eastern Standard)

Good luck!

======================================
Previous Contests: (for inspiration)

2008
2007
2006
2005
2003

======================================
Pictures:

Abby Johnson
Chad Sweely
Chris Crum
Chris Heiss
John Overbee
Jordan Mynk
Kirin Knapp
Mark Rivera
Mike McDonald
Rafael Robinson
Taylor Pile
Tiffany Doughty
Travis Taylor

Does such a program exist?

fiddler — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:07:35 GMT

I have a client who has two websites on content management systems. He has customers that are front end users for both sites. These customers have the ability to create a page and upload photos on that page. The one cms is set to limit the photo in size so that the photos are no more than 70 kb in size, as well as no more than 600x600 pixels. The other cms has not set limitations. The problem is, his customers are clueless on how to edit photos coming from their camera, so they upload (or try to upload) photos that are 300 dpi, 2400x2400 and are over 2 mg in size.

On the website that has the set limitations, those photos get rejected and the customers end up sending my client their photos so his staff can resize insert them onto the appropriate pages. It is a tedious and time-consuming task.

For the website that has no set limitations, the large photos take a very long time to load and distort the template. To correct the size and display problem, I recently batch edited over 400 over-sized photos that had already been uploaded to the server.

My client does NOT want to put any instructions on the website to teach the customers how to optimize their photos before uploading them.

What he wants is to allow the customers to upload their very large photos as is, then have a program installed on the content management system that will, in turn, automatically resized each photo to the appropriate dpi, pixel and kb size, so the photos will load quickly and display accurately on the website, and have a small footprint on the server.

I do not know of anything that will do what my client wants. Does such a program exist? If so, is it possible to incorporate such a photo editor into the cms? Of the two websites my client has set up with front end users, one is using Joomla, the other uses CMS Made Simple.

If no such program exists, is someone out there able and willing to create such a program? If so, my client would like to hire you.