I expect the odd bit of promotional email to arrive every now and again. But recently I’ve noticed a marked increase in emails offering web services and/or SEO, always from India, and always sent to at least four separate email addresses at this domain (contact@, support@, services@, ceo@, products@, among others – none of which even exist). Come on guys, please don’t make me set up a spam filter to look for the word ‘India’.

Here’s a quick website design I recently completed for a holiday apartment in Cannes. The client was looking for a refresh of their existing site, so I designed a quick-loading page template with a sunny feel and moved over all the existing content to the new design with a few on-site search engine optimizations thrown in. Everything up and running in under 48 hours.

If you view the site in Internet Explorer you’ll see that all the boxes (including the heading banner image) have square corners, but if you use a proper browser like Firefox, you should see rounded corners. I know it’s a bit of a cop out, and I did (briefly) investigate JQuery rounded corners, but in the end I opted for a IE conditional comment to replace the heading strap with an alternate (square cornered) image so that at least the look and feel is consistent depending on which browser the site is viewed in.

I’m also now a big fan of Parallels Desktop for the Mac. While I was doing a quick check for cross-browser compatibility I was able to run Firefox and Safari and Explorer versions 6, 7 & 8 all at the same time on my laptop. Possibly the subject of a future blog post I think…

I’ve recently been experimenting with Cufón text replacement, and decided to put it to use on a site I’ve been messing about with. I’d also been converting the whole thing to a Wordpress-powered site (more on that later), so it seemed to make sense to look for a plug-in to do the job.

So, the plugin is called WP-Cufon and you can get it at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cufon/

It’s quick to install, has good documentation, and it’s easy enough to specify some rules to control the text replacement on your site.

So for example I’ve used :

Cufon.replace('h1', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h2', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h5');
Cufon.replace('#navbar a');

which replaces the font for h1, h2, h5 headings and any link text within the ‘navbar’ div with a special font of my own making. All of the subsequent styling is covered by CSS. It really is very simple to set up.

You need to convert your font first into a format that Cufon can handle – there’s a Cufon generator that does the whole thing very neatly. It also, importantly, allows you to limit usage to certain domains to protect the font from use elsewhere.

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Over on the right there you should be seeing a little widget-like thing showing the weather forecast for Lovely Leitrim. It’s using my own TV graphics-style Weather Icons which you can get here.

I don’t know exactly (yet) how to make it into a downloadable widget that other people could use on their own sites, but if I get time I may investigate how to package it up. At the moment it’s just hard coded into a regular text widget. And it’s also hard coded to pick up the weather forecast for Carrick-on-Shannon, so I expect the appeal might be… er… limited.

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I’ve had plenty of people visiting my site looking for weather symbols to download so I thought it was about time that I actually made some weather symbols of my own.

The problem has been that everyone has been trying to get their hands on the old BBC ones which I ‘refreshed’ slightly as part of the 2005 BBC Weather relaunch. Obviously those symbols are owned by the Beeb, but I’ve been directing people back to the Weather Centre anyway, in the sure knowledge that they won’t be allowed to use them for copyright reasons. One visitor also reported back that they were refused permission because it also might be perceived as a ‘degree of endorsement by the BBC’.

Which is entirely fair enough.

So I decided to design a set of 40 new and unique weather symbols / icons that have a kind of ‘homage to old school TV graphics’ quality to them, but which have been designed entirely from scratch and obviously haven’t taken a single point, line or vector from the originals.

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As part of my Online Video Marketing Services, I’ve just completed a little 50 second web commercial for textatrack.co.uk – it’s been put together entirely from scratch with After Effects, using 3D animations and Photoshop layers. The 3D phone and laptop models were bought in separately and modified by me using Cinema 4D. …read more

A quick redesign for the local website for Blackheath – a lovely little village in Surrey.

Visit the site at www.blackheathsurrey.co.uk

If you have a website of your own – maybe one that was built years ago and in need of a quick ‘refresh’ – please do get in touch. We can copy your existing content over to a fresh new design in no time at all.

As well as a cleaner look, your new site will be optimised for faster loading and better search engine placement. So if your site is looking a bit tired and worn out, contact us for a bit of ‘website spring cleaning’.

Has anyone else spent ages staring at a spinning ‘LOADING’ image? Watching the little guy spining away – then realising the connection has hung and the upload (or download) stopped hours ago. It’s amazing how a little bit of movement can imply all sorts of activity, which may (or may not) actually be happening.