Since some of us are developing prototypes for sites or apps for children in interaction design I felt this would be something appropriate to point out.
It confirms some of what we learned in that class, and gives visual examples to help us get it.
Coding for the wordpress toolbar
Since many of us are using wordpress for some aspect of our final project, I thought this article would be highly appropriate.
It gives the basic coding lowdown on some basic commands for the wordpress toolbar, such as hiding menus; and then goes into detail about some fairly complex actions and code, such as fetching and displaying data from offsite XML files within your own toolbar. This is something I might actually experiment with in my own project after everything’s mostly done.
A fun approach to web design?
We may overlook the fun factor when designing a website. Here’s an article that tries to show us the ways we can bring fun back into web design and think a bit outside of the box.
Stop writing project proposals
I read this article and thought it was funny. Here we’ve been placing great importance on learning how to write project proposals in several classes, but now to think there’s a better way to go about it, it just seems funny.
The basic gist of the “project evaluation” is that rather than “proposing” a project to a client that they either like or dislike, you “evaluate” every aspect of what they want and suggest or recommend different things, all for a set evaluation fee. The evaluation lets you research and plan out almost everything about the project in depth so after the project gets the go ahead, there’s little else to actually research.
codeyear
I observed another student on this site in a class last week and thought it was a great idea. Basically it’s a program through codeacademy that will send you a programming lesson every week for a year. The lessons start out simple, and get more difficult as time goes on. This is a great way for people who are either very busy, or tend to lack motivation to delve into code on their own to learn code in manageable chunks. The interface it uses also seems to be fairly robust, and good at guiding those who may get lost in the code.
If you want to learn coding, improve, or just practice, it’s definitely something worth checking out.
Skittles
I’ve never really been one for the whole social networking thing, but I have to say I really like the way skittles has played off this massive push into social networking and geared their entire site towards it. I especially like how the page continues to expand as you scroll downward. It really creates the thought of “what else is there?” and almost forces people to keep scrolling just to see what lies beneath. Even though it begins to repeat at a certain point you just keep scrolling for the twitter comments. And that accomplishes the goal of keeping people on the site for as long as possible.
Since we’ve been starting on javascript and object oriented programming I thought this article would be apporpriate.
This has the basics and some examples for setting up your CSS code to work well in an object oriented format to make it easier to understand and modify at a later date. This comes with the benefits of smaller file sizes for large websites.
Textures
Looking for ways to spice up my own designs with textures I found this article.
It’s a fairly simple do’s and dont’s of textures, and has a short how to for creating your own textures.
3D CSS
I just happened across this on my iGoogle homepage. It’s amazing to me that something like this is even possible, though not yet completely viable, it’s certainly worth investigating and playing with to get an understanding of for when it does become viable across all browsers.
Beyond the site design itself he also has some other pretty amazing stuff.
Blogging
I find it incredibly ironic that this quarter in two classes we’re blogging. Over the break I met a web designer in the industry at a relative’s birthday and he said the best way to really break into the field was to blog. I could see myself using a blog occasionally to update things I’ve done or found. I can also see myself experimenting with wordpress to be an alternate way to display some portfolio work just to have an alternative to my main site. Experimenting with wordpress will also let me suggest it to future clients and actually know what I’m talking about.
