If your a seasoned web developer your going to want to follow some great resource sites. I myself have quite a large list of RSS feeds in my Outlook but here are my top ten with plenty of resources, freebies and tips…I will however feature 5 “biggies” and 5 “smallies” if that makes any sense to anyone who speaks the English language…

Here we go with the biggies…

1. SmashingMagazine.com

Packed full of daily web resources from desktop calendars to tips on learning CSS. They have also recently had a redesign massively cleaning up the content (which was pretty bad on my opinion) and also aggregating content from websites such as spyrestudios.com, buildinternet.com and webdesignerwall.com. All of which are also great resources…

2. WebDesignerDepot.com

Not specific in it’s content, Web Designer Depot seems to feature everything from Illustrator spotlights (like the recent one on the amazing Archan Nair) all the way to freebies such as the nice RSS icon set. I do however recommend they remove the horrible “I WAS a fat slob” adverts on the right as it’s pretty dire to see (see screenshot to the right)…

3. Spyrestudios.com

Is very good at eyeing up great web designs and showcasing them on their site. They are a small design agency in Canada but have a great blog. They also recently showcased my website because of it’s use of cufon, the amazing javascript text replacement (towards the bottom of the list).

4. BestWebGallery.com

Not a brilliant resource per se but it does feature some amazing modern designs. Not to be used as a starting point for designs but rather as “subliminal inspiration”.

5. BuildInternet.com

Build Internet is managed by twins Sam and Zach Dunn and is a great place to read more about the business side of website design. It’s packed full of jQuery tutorials, graphic design resources, CSS information and HTML tips. Give it a look.

Now for the smallies, generally sole developers who blog about their industry, not necessarily “small”…

6. Adii Rockstar

Now Adii is quite a little celebrity online. He’s known well for his work on the WooThemes project which sells premium wordpress themes but makes for a very interesting read.

7. Fabio Sasso

He’s the guy behind abduzeedo.com and seems to be in deep in the website design world. He has some great work to check out and is involved in a large number of successful websites packed full of resources and inspiration.

8. Veerle Pieters

A graphic/web designer from Belgium, Veerle has tons of posts from over the years covering stuff from html to illiustrations. It makes for an interesting read if you dig deep into the older content. You’ll also see just how much a great designer knows about their industry when you read Veerle’s blog.

9. Collis

Probably should reside in the biggies list but because we aren’t talking about his amazing success story, Envato, he slots into the smallies. He’s the CEO of one of the largest and greatest design marketplaces on the web. He has his own blog called the Netsetter which covers mainly covers the business side of the design industry. (he also features a lot of guest writers too)

10. Chris Spooner

Because he’s a local boy! Chris was born and raised in Sheffield, UK, and runs his blog over at Spoon Graphics. He posts some great content covering mainly graphic design but it a great source of inspiration.

There are many more people to check out in the web design world, you just have a dig, and when you find them either subscribe to their RSS feed or follow them on Twitter like a stalker. Either way you’ll get great resources and good reads!

Also see @liammckay @kevinrose @shauninman @jasonfried

I know it’s unfortunately the “taboo” of modern website design, but many developers don’t want to simply leave their IE7 visitors and IE6 visitors in the dark. It’s fine for sites like this one, or for web applications but what about corporation websites? For sites that HAVE to support older/alternative browsers. This came to light ever more when I recently worked on a website which would mean that customers worth millions could possibly be using IE6. There’s 50% of employees there too who still run IE7 so not supporting them wasn’t an option. I needed (and used) a large set of tools to help me accomplish this task, and I’m going to tell you about them.

Every web developer should (and probably does) use these tools on a daily basis. They streamline your development and help speed up little niggles with your site.

Read More & Comment…

So it’s 4 months in on my new job and I’ve finally just launched the brand new Result Group website. It’s three solid months of development, hundreds and hundreds of tweaks, 1500+ lines of CSS and thousands more of XHTML programming and PHP. It’s built entirely by hand, no cheap CMS systems and no limitations on scalability. It also runs part of the site on Wordpress (see the Rental News section).

Result Group develop world leading Rental Management Software and they needed a world class website to go along with that. The site was redesigned from the ground up by myself and there has been a lot of work chucked into a very fast moving three months. We finally went live last week and as of now, all hiccups seem to have been rubbed out.

It also uses GeoIP technology to direct you to the correct regional site (United States visit us.rentalresult.com while UK visit www.rentalresult.com).

It really was a mammoth task and one in which I’m very proud to have built solely.

Go check out Result Groups rentalresult website for their rental software and check out the design and jQuery loveliness.

I go on holiday in 5 days and it’s going to be an experience! Theres a group of us going (with about 7 cameras, 4 iPhones, a laptop, a motorhome and 1200 driving miles through Europe) Because there are four creatives on board we decided to build a website documenting our travels.

The outcome is http://drve.co.uk/ so make sure you check it out. You can also follow our tweets @drve09.

So University is done and dusted for 2009. I won’t be returning until September 2010 which makes for a nice break. In the end I got my grades (A,A,B,B,B,C) which I was very happy with. To top all this off I thought I’d showcase some of the work I did to receive these grades.

Visual Design (B Grade)

I’ll start with a Module I didn’t thoroughly enjoy this year due to boring briefs, however, I did a little bit of illustration for it which included some postage stamps, posters and even included some Video in After Effects. You can see the video, the illustrations and the posters over at http://turnitoff.info/ (the posters reside in the footer of the page)
The site was built using the latest in Javascript and jQuery technology so check it out, hover over the elements, play with the buttons. Your probably better off using FireFox too, as IE couldn’t really handle it’s superior web modernness. Make sure you check out the video at the bottom of the website too (yes that is me speaking sounding common as muck).

For Visual design I also illustrated the stamps shown in the header image. It’s based on Music Technology over the years and I think I captured the best four from the past century or so. You can see them in all their vector glory too.

Multimedia Product (C Grade)

This was a complex one, which also means I can’t demonstrate it online. The idea was simple, Unique Bidding auctions.

The site featured a worlds first in online bidding. Live real time bidding in auctions. You could actually watch LIVE bidders placing their respective amounts on the page as it went along. This meant users could bid against each other based on other users’ bids. Clever eh! It was all jQuery and PHP grabbing the data from a database. It was awfully complex and also included a 10,000 word document explaing the process and research behind it. There was also a very fancy presentation which explains the fundementals if anyone wants to watch it. Its the branding, the functionality and the UI all rolled into a short few slides.

It also had it’s own iPhone web application which tied into the whole site shwoing live bids from anywhere in the world at any time.

Web Programming (A grade)

Another interesting one. And one which I actually really enjoyed.

Assignment one involved building a file based Guestbook with full admin features, the ability to edit posts and delete them, a swear word filter to stip out those naughty words and a slick simple UI. It also had AJAX editing of comments right in the page. No loading, no navigating, just click and change! I think you can guess what Lady Part and Ping Pongs were supposed to say! It maybe available as a free download if anyone is interested in the future.

Assignment two was a dog database website. Very similar to Battersea dogs homes website. It needed full admin controls and the ability to save dogs as favourites and have the ability to search the dogs too. The brief was very extensive, and I covered everything. Check it out online right now. I ended up building a commercial site based on this for Cliffe Kennels.

Authoring (B Grade)

It was basically Actionscript 3.0 work. For assignment 1 I had to develop an interface which included an animation, using the drawing API and the components within Flash 8. I ended up building a Spirograph kind of application which allowed you to colour it yourself and watch the application build it for you. Very nice! Have a look at it. I also built a flash gallery using XML and class files. But it’s not something I have online at the moment.

Multimedia Design & Production (A Grade)

This is a group project, and something which is a real challenge working with four different creative minds. My University chum Chris Kovalenko was part of our A grade group which created a chairty website and CDROM called the West Yorkshire Autistic Society (completely fake). Check out the site.

Intro to Video (B Grade)

My mate Adam Fisher helped me out with this one as I couldn’t star, edit and film the whole video. He rode the bike, I edited it, The Chemists supplied the music. It actually works quite well for my first every video. So I’m quite happy with it as a 2nd year project.

That’s it! I hope this gives someone some kind of inspiration either for university or for their next project. If it did help you in any way shape or form, drop me a comment!

I LOVE the new IE8 adverts. They feature that guy from The New Adventures of Superman (Dean Cain). It’s a shame I’m a FF3.5 user and IE8 is fourth in my list (behind Safari & Opera) of browsers to use. They are brilliant though.

I have gritting rage!. Download Firefox then you plonk. :D

Additionally I have omitted the “Puke” advert as it wasn’t that funny (and kinda horrible to watch). But you can still watch it anyway.

Well, the 1st June saw me start my new job as Innovations Web Developer at Result Group in Elland. I decided that to mark the occasion I’d start by going crazy with my on-line development.
It has seen me redesign the Arctic Monkeys Fansite, build a brand new website for Cliffe Kennels, build a Twitter/Twitpic/img.ly/yfrog mashup called TwiPho and then finally redesigning Zero One Hundred (the site your on now). It’s been a hard slog of a month but one of great productivity. Next will be redeveloping Result Groups website to bring it up to modern standards. It’s something I’m really relishing and something which isn’t going to be easy. It involves a full redesign of structure, the actual look of the site and additionally it’s functionality. The aim is to bang out a perfect, intuitive design which will hopefully feature on some of the great web design galleries. That’s the aim, recognition.

I’ve just launched the brand new Cliffe Kennels & Rescue site for the world to view. Dennise needed a brand new image for their boarding kennels to attract more customers to the business. I built them a full PHP/MySQL site with a fully integrated admin section so they could add and remove the animals on their own website. It adds the animals to the database, generates image thumbnails for them and basically makes life easier. I also did all the photography for the site too.

Check out the brand new design over at http://cliffekennels.co.uk/ and maybe even think about rescuing a dog too!

(If your really interested you can see the old website over here. Blargh!)

Well, it seems I have more time on my hands than I need. Wednesday my on-line chum Matt decided he wanted to “build something”. Anything he said. He was open to suggestions. One of those was a Twitter photo search. To cut a long story short I stole by own suggestion and built it myself.

TwiPho was born out of two days coding (Thursday, 7th May and Friday 8th May) which accumulated to about 8 hours coding. Not bad to say I visited Alton Towers on Friday too.

Anyway, TwiPho is a Twitter Photo Search engine. It uses Twitters brilliant API (which I wrote about Wednesday) including TwitPic’s API, img.ly’s API and yfrog’s API. All Twitter image hosts. It searches though Twitter to find images related to a search keyword and shows you the images. 100% JavaScript, 100% AJAX. It uses the powerful jQuery framework too, which is a massive boost for my programming ego.

Anyway please have a look at it over at http://twipho.net/ and even let you friends know about it on Twitter!

It’s even been featured on jQuery Style, so thanks again to them!

Fancy riding 1,200 Miles across the UK starting from Lands End and finishing at John O Groats? No? Me neither!

These two guys are though (Adam Fisher and Oliver Frearson) and I felt obligated to build them a website promoting their journey. It’s in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support and they are trying to raise £3000 (that’s only £2.50 per mile!).

Check out the website, visit their blog (which will be updated en route) and give them a bit of support.

If your feeling generous you can also donate by clicking the big donate button on the top left corner. Anything will do, even 1 pence, it all adds up.

The portfolio page looked a little drab. Afterall I am working SOLID completing work left right and center. Not all of this can go into my portfolio page as it’s more University work and stuff built on a personal basis. This then spawned the “Showcase” page. Have a play with the few flash and javascript games on there as well as reading about some of the smaller projects I have been completing to get me through University.

In the next few weeks it’s going to be developed a little more to display more images and information on each project. But for now it’s a start ;-)

The other day I realised I had loads of spare web stuff lying around on my hard drive which included canned designs, unused web pages, old university assignments and old website designs (PSD’s and XHTML/CSS).

Well, today I decided I’d start releasing this spare stuff online. If I’m not using it maybe someone else can get something out of it. That was the idea behind the Wordpress Olivia template, it was an old design which morphed into a pretty popular free template.

Anyway, we start this new routine of free downloads with a free XHTML template complete with instructions on how to use and modify it.

You can view a demo of the free XHTML theme or even download it for yourself to dissect, prod and poke.
There is also a tutorial on how to edit the pages, adding paragraphs and headers and also how to edit the CSS. It’s a basic tutorial but it explains the beginner methods.

Unfortunately there won’t be much support for it. You’ll have to work it out for yourself. If you are really really stuck you can drop comments for this post below and I’ll try my damn hardest to answer. Honest.

Download (370kb) | View Demo

Please note: This tutorial is for beginners. It’s a short vague guide to push you in the right direction. I believe “learn by seeing and doing” is the best approach.

Many developers struggle to use the basic tools in Adobe’s award winning software Photoshop when designing websites. It can help a lot to know some simple techniques and tools when building XHTML pages. You don’t have to use the very awful splicing function at all.

Let’s start with the idea of building a very simple design using a set colour palette and a set width. After these simple tips I will also supply a number of useful links to visit to help you further.

Read More & Comment…

Theme Demo – Download Now 670kb

I am pleased to announce that you can now download the brand new Wordpress theme named “Olivia” direct from our website and soon from the official Wordpress themes gallery.

It has been in development for a long time but good things come to those who wait!

Key features of the theme:

1. Seven brilliant styles including a Grunge style and Magic style!
2. Beautifully designed
3. Wordpress 2.6.3 compatible
4. Widget ready!
5. Built on the famous 960 grid system
6. FamFamFam Silk Icons
7. jQuery functions including text size modification
8. Basic stylesheet for accessibility
9. Thumbnail generation

To coincide with the release of the theme I have written a quick tutorial explaining how to use the features explained…

Read More & Comment…

It’s not far off release date! (well within a week hopefully!)

Features of the theme:

1. Clean fluent design based on the 960 grid system
2. Beautifully selected colour tones
3. FamFamFam silk icons (as they are very pretty)
4. Various stylesheets (colours)
5. Widget ready, as all new themes usually come
6. Other neat little features!

Check out the image of the design above and leave us some feedback and request for features!
We will post the download right here next week and will also submit it to the Wordpress Gallery.

Check back soon!

This week sees Microsoft leave behind the IE7 which had lasted for two years, and announces the second beta of IE8, but does more effort need to be placed on getting users to actually upgrade, rather than adding another version number to the mix?

According to W3.org there are more or less the same amount of users toddling along with IE6 as there are IE7. IE6 is seven years old yesterday (27th) and still holds a market share of around 25% while IE7 holds 26%.

Firefox is steadily climbing up the browser tree holding 42%, and nearly all of those users are on the latest version (or there about). Why is this? Do Internet Explorer users not bother? Is it too complicated? Or is it even due to piracy? After all, if you have an illegal key, you won’t be able to upgrade. Let’s make a few points and ask some questions…

Read More & Comment…

The web has changed a lot and web designers (of all people) know about the need to keep up to date with the latest design “trends”.

This short 10 point guide will hopefully help some people understand the minor problems website design (and content) brings when being viewed by a potential customer.

1. Pointless Flash Animation
   I’m all up for interactive flash in websites, but only use it if it’s necessary. Many a web developer will say “try doing the same in javascript, it’s better”, which is usually true, but animations which have no purpose other than to distract the user are pointless, bandwidth consuming and damn irritating.
   Check out Avistar’s Globe Animation. It’s awful to look at, and awfully slow.

   Read More & Comment…