Desert Web Designs Blog

Recently a good friend of mine, Chad, who goes by the moniker “Big Daddy”, was at the hospital when his doctor gave him a severe wake up call: “Lose weight because your life could be at stake.” Chad was tipping the scales at 438 lbs. Needless to say it’s a slap in the face that no one wants to hear. Chad’s doctors believe that he has a disorder that prevents his brain from being told he’s full. Chad has tried numerous countless diets, exercise, doctor supervised nutritionists, Atkins, Weight Watchers, and others; all with temporary success, but with no lasting results. Ultimately, Chad has decided to have the Lap-Band Surgery done. Unfortunately, because this is not considered a “medical” reason for having the surgery, his insurance is not covering one bit of the $8,000 price tag.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t happen to just have $8,000 lying around, although I wish I did. So, to help raise the money, Chad created a website SaveBigDaddy.com. As of this posting, Chad and his family have raised around $6,000 towards the surgery, scheduled for July 11th. Now obviously when one of your best friends is in a situation like this, you want to do what you can to help. However, my wife and I are in the process of buying our first house (yay us!), so we don’t exactly have money coming out our ears either, not that we do normally. So I thought the least I could do is extend my services to Chad and offer to host his site for him. It’s not much but it will save him $50-$100.

Second, Chad had a fundraiser last night at the bar he hosts karaoke at, The Reagle Beagle. They were hoping to raise the remaining $2000 needed through drink specials, donations, raffles, a dating auction and more. I just got word that $1400 was raised leaving them with about $500 to go. As part of the raffle, we donated a free 5-page website design, plus domain name and hosting for 1 year, an approximate $500 value. No word yet from the winner, but we’ll keep you posted as to the winner and their site.

And to quote Chad, “After the surgery instead of calling me ‘Big Daddy’, you can just call me ‘Daddy’.”

I was reading some science & tech news postings at google today and came across an article posted at ChannelWeb. The purpose of the article is to promote Mozilla’s efforts to set a Guinness World Record highest number of software downloads in a single day with the release of the new Firefox 3.0 web browser on June 17th, 2008.

For those of you living under or a rock, or hopelessly devoted to Microsoft, or if you just have never heard of it, Firefox is an award-winning open-source web browser from Mozilla. According to the W3C statistics, Firefox currently has a 39.1% market share of web browsers as of April 2008. When compared separately to the two major versions Internet Explorer (6 and 7), Firefox is the most popular browser in use on the internet. I can’t say for sure when I first started using Firefox, but it’s been at least 3-4 years, if not more, and I havn’t looked back since. I am a strong supporter of Firefox for a number of reason, most of which come from a web development standpoint. I thoroughly enjoy Firefox mainly because it has better support for web standards. (Read more about Web Standards in my post “We’re getting NAKED!! But don’t get too excited.“) Not only that, but as an open-source web browser, Firefox has a plethora of user-developed add-ons and themes available to customize your the look, feel, and performance of your browser. One of my favorites is the Web Developer Add-On (for obvious reasons). There are plenty of other add-ons for assisting with bookmarking features, managing feed subscriptions, toolbars, search tools, social networking management, and many more. See the full list of Firefox Add-ons.

As if all that isn’t enough, Mozilla is releasing the new Firefox 3.0 this Tuesday June 17th, 2008. Currently, Firefox 3.0 is in its 3rd Release Candidate stage, basically a testing version. I have been using Firefox 3.0 for the past couple weeks as it is the default browser shipped with the newest version of the Linux Ubuntu 8.04 Operating System. So far, I have been pretty happy with what I have seen. One of the first things I noticed was the improved history recollection. From the Mozilla website:

Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for. Results are returned according to their frecency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that you’re seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!

Another thing I noticed is when you close the browser with multiple tabs open, you are presented with the option to remember the tabs for the next time you open the browser. This is a very useful feature when the browser needs to be restarted after a plugin or add-on installation so you don’t have to reopen all the pages you just had up. There are plenty of other new features in Firefox 3.0 and you can check them all out at the Mozilla Firefox 3.0 release notes page.

This Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 has been coined “Download Day” by SpreadFirefox.com and is Mozilla’s attempt to set a world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours and will occur on Firefox 3 launch day. To take part in the world record attempt, and to assist in spreading the word about Firefox, simply download Firefox 3 (preferably from the Download Day Headquarters) on launch day this Tuesday. You can pledge your support to download and help set the world record by going to the Download Day Home Page. As of the writing of this article, there are approximately 1.3 million pledges worldwide. You can view a breakdown of the numbers by country around the world there as well.

For more information about “Download Day”, visit the Download Day FAQ.

Desert Web Designs is pleased to announce the launch of our latest site:

AllOutdoorsPhotography.com

The Site

AllOutdoorsPhotography.com is an online photo gallery displaying the photographs of Mesa, AZ photographer Gus Koernig. Gus’s portfolio features photographs from around the United States, including Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Carolina, and more, as well as Australia and New Zealand. AllOutdoorsPhotography.com focuses on capturing the beauty of the world that we live, from Mountains to Streams, Waterfalls to Seascapes, Sunrises and Sunsets to Cityscapes, these images will take your breath away. All photos on the site are available for sale with options of a print only or a beautiful museum-style mounting for easy display. All photos come hand-signed by the photographer.

The Design

Our design process for AllOutdoorsPhotography.com started a little different than most. First off, Gus was fairly open to the design of the site and didn’t really have anything in particular in mind with regards to the layout/design of the site. This left us not only with an option to experiment, but also didn’t give us a lot of direction to start with either. The ultimate goal of the site was to display the images in a gallery format with the implementation of a shopping cart functionality to allow for the purchase of the photos.

We started out by coming up with a number of different layout ideas in a process called “wireframing.” Wireframing involves creating

“black-and-white diagrams that illustrate blocks of content, navigation, or functionality…used as a tool to communicate content and structure without the distractions of color and imagery.”

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke

Here’s an example of some of our wireframes

With a layout selected by Gus, we set forth on creating our website comps. The comps were the basic structure and layout of the site as actual web pages for Gus to get a feel for how the selected wireframe would translate to an actual working web site. The comps were designed in basic HTML and CSS and, once approved by Gus, were very easy to convert into PHP by taking our duplicate content (page headers, footers, and navigation bars) and copying them into a PHP include file. This took care of the majority of the site

The remainder (and bulk) of the site involved displaying the photos from stored database information and creating the shopping cart. By storing the image information in a database, it allows Gus to login to the CMS we created for him to upload new photos, remove existing, change prices, on his own. It also cuts down on the amount of code required for each page of the site. From there, it was simply a matter of creating the shopping cart (which is not as easy as I’m making it sound) for purchasing the orders. There are a lot of caveats to creating a custom shopping cart and, as a designer/developer, you need to make sure that all of those are covered. I won’t cover those here, but let’s just say that the attention to detail is a high priority and can make or break a custom shopping cart. For more information about creating shopping carts, I recommend Constructing Usable Shopping Carts by Clifton Evans, Jody Kerr, and Jon Stephens

All in all, the site for AllOutdoorsPhotography.com took us approximately 45 hours to complete and included the following services:

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• PHP
• AJAX
• MySQL
• Flash
• Custom Shopping Cart
• Custom CMS
• Logo Design