Seattle Website Design Blog - Kool Kat Web Desgins

I am really excited that the website for Centered, a Woodinville Pilates Studio, has launched. It was pretty intense working on this site since it had a tight time frame in which to launch.

While working on my latest e-commerce site, I  (of-course) wanted to check out other sites. I am really amazed at how many web designers are still using table in table design and have not switched to standards based design with slim markup and css for styling.

I wonder if clients ever think about how state-of-the-art their web designers are or are not?

Just a thought on what I am working these days. I have been spending my time putting together an e-commerce site for Flutterlights which sell fabulous custom candles. You get to pick just a wild variety of colors and scents like blackberry pie a la mode!

I must be obsessing about this topic. In any case, I was reading Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design With XHTML, CSS, And DOM by Cameron Adams and decided to look at one of the featured sites, www.dirtyprettythingsband.com.

While the site looks great, just try making the text size larger and suddenly that cool ragged background image behind the menu items just loses its impact and the words run together. UGH!

There are many blogs and information pages about this topic. Most address how to design so the end user selects the preferred text size for the browser. There is lots of discusion on EMs, PXs and line height. However, no one talks much about the problem that there are no websites that look good when sized differently from the font size the web designer specified as the default. Everyone eventually overflows boundaries, wraps around is in general rather horrible looking!

I went to hear Lawrence Lessig speak at the University of Washington. While the topic was Is Google (2008) Microsoft (1998)? I was struck by something unrelated that he mentioned. Many of us upload videos, pictures, even code to various internet sites—often ignoring the terms posted on these sites. These terms typically claim full ownership of everything we upload giving us no rights to what we created. Does this seem fair? Not to me. So, be careful what you upload!

I just tried it out for image rollovers on my site. While it makes the HTML markup very clean, it does make the code more obscure and a bit harder to figure out when you want to debug. At least for me, its way less obvious that something is happening on a mouseover or onclick event.

Just learned today the xhtml does not support target in strict mode. I know I am behind the times in getting this info but it really annoyed me. I haven’t uncovered why it is not supported but it seems ridiculous to lose features. And, yes, I know you can use javascript or extend the DTD to work around this but it just seems so unnecessary.

Any one have any thoughts on this?

After much discussion and a lot of effort, the FindaCounselor.net has finally launched!

I have just start using Adobe’s spry framework for Ajax. On my portfolio page, I have implemented an XML dataset with fade in and out effects as you move through each site.

For Vincafe, I am using an html dataset for recipes but no cool effects.