Web Design Blog

Websites: The Big Five Web Hosting Backend Tools

Websites: The Big Five Web Hosting Backend Tools

When picking your web hosting company for the first time, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when you look through the options for what the host offers. Here, we present the top five most-used back-end technologies – and what they are good for!

1. PHP

The number-one server-side scripting language. Probably 90% of all the web applications you’ll find on the Internet are written in PHP, from blogs to bulletin boards to galleries to shopping cart applications. PHP is designed with the web enterprise in mind. In the case of Linux website hosting, it’s a lead-pipe certainty that this will be included.

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By EarthMovinMedia, ago

A Web-Designer Shares their Toolchain

It’s always nice when web designers share their tools of the trade, especially when it’s a mom-and-pop outfit.

This designer lists a lot of free and open source tools which they use to build a pretty impressive portfolio. Fancy IDE? Nah, Notepad++! And a freebie FavIcon generator. Open-source Firebug, the Firefox extension that turns Firefox into a power development tool. And of course, for graphics… Gimp.

People are always astonished when you say you use Gimp for production work. Bad press from Adobe and a legion of elitist Photoshop users have given people the false impression that Gimp can’t do anything, like it’s not even as functional as Microsoft Paint. No, Gimp is really all you need for basic web graphics. It’s just doomed to live in the shadow of everyone who doesn’t want a Gimp, but instead wants an open-source Photoshop.

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
The Very First Banner Ad

A Piece of Web History – The Very First Banner Ad

SCTimes brought up the very first web banner ad, created by none other than – AT&T! The American telecommunications company (and father of Unix and the C programming language, to boot) launched this ad in 1994.

For those of you who don’t remember, the banner ad’s phrase “you will” was the catch-phrase for AT&T’s early-’90s marketing campaign. TV commercials featured voice-overs asking “Have you ever…” followed by some Utopian visions of futuristic tech usage, and then closing with “you will! And the company that will bring it to you… AT&T!” It was so saturated that numerous parodies sprung up in computing culture. Some original AT&T ads on YouTube.

 

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
UX stands for user experience

Your Buzzword For The Day: UX

“UX” stands for “user experience”, and a blogger over at Mashable talks about 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.

The article does cover some good ground on the whole subject of interface – whoops – experience design, and is worth a look just for the thought it provokes. I like #4: It’s not “just about usability”. No, it actually has to do something worthwhile, is the point that needs emphasizing.

While I agree that experience design is important, and there are designs that are better than others, I have noticed in the past few years amongst the professionals with “nebulous titles” (see #9) is that they try to hard to justify their profession and end up over-thinking the whole thing. The best intentions and all that, you know. But have you ever seen something designed by a committee? Say, a government committee? Then you know what I’m talking about.

It’s good to be aware of the need to design the user experience, but at some point we also need to quit making up six-syllable words, get out of our academic ivory towers, and just say “It’s a button and a menu! Leave it alone!”

 

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Our Favorite CSS Showcases

Our Favorite CSS Showcases

For everybody who doesn’t use Internet Explorer, CSS is the gift from the gods that made the web more beautiful. Galleries of CSS magic, then, basically boil down to “porn for web designers”.

While your day-to-day reality will more likely involve getting a shopping cart application to check credit card numbers correctly on a client’s ASP-powered site, you can always dream of a world where Microsoft is shelled into the ground and we can all use the modern, 21st-century web.

CSS Play – Stu Nicholls is nothing less than the wizard of CSS. Is there anything he can’t do with it? He can draw Christmas trees, make maze games, animate sprites, create fly-out and pop-out menus, and tell you ten ways to make an interactive image gallery. (more…)

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Five Predictions For The Social Web for the Next Five Years

Five Predictions For The Social Web for the Next Five Years

Since other bloggers are jumping on the band wagon and making predictions for 2009 (because that’s what bloggers do!), I’ll go one better, and also delay the time before anybody can prove me wrong: I’ll predict through 2014! OK, crystal ball/ on the table/ tell all the future/ that you’re able. Something’s coming in…

Yahoo still won’t get bought. – Did that get your attention? We spent the better part of 2008 gossiping about Yahoo and Microsoft and their expected tryst. Never happened. Microsoft is too greedy to pay through the nose and Yahoo is too full of pride to offer lower. And Yahoo is actually still more profitable than some 90% of web-based businesses. They still made $7.22 billion in 2008 and they’re still a Fortune 500 company, OK?

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By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Free or Cheap Graphic Design Tools

Free (or Cheap) Graphic Design Tools

Colour us “jumping to conclusions”, but we’d have to guess that Photoshop is the best-known graphic design tool out there. but it’s not an optimal solution for everybody – the price tag is high, it has a steep learning curve such that you could spend years studying it and not know all of it, and it’s also aimed more for print graphics than web graphics.

For those of you looking for a more compact and economical solution, here’s a list of tools you might want to look into. These are all less costly (all but one is free!) to download and use, and are geared more towards smaller solution sets as well.

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By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Web Geeks

Web Geeks – Meet Your Idols!

We missed this a while back with all the pre-Holiday rush, but IT-News Australia published the list of the top ten geeks of all time. And yes, it is an article which uses the word ‘geek’ in the positive sense, the way we used to use the word ‘hacker’.

The list is worth pursuing, because it reminds us of all the people without whom we web developers wouldn’t have a job today:

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By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Hollywood Hates Web Designers

Hollywood Hates Web Designers

I say that because nearly every film and TV program that comes out, when it shows a computer screen, has some fantastically unrealistic magic going on. So the expectation is set high, and when clients come to you to design their website, they wonder why you can’t make it work like that.

From the orchestra-conductor interface in Minority Report to the fantasy computers on the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek (you like how Captain Picard can talk to the computer, but the bridge crew still has to push a million buttons to drive the ship?), the film and TV industries are acting like they’ve never seen a computer in their entire lives.

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By EarthMovinMedia, ago