We recently attended Speak the Web in Sheffield and Leeds and brought a lot of really useful information and ideas away with us. I attended the Leeds talk where Andy Clarke, a well respected designer, leader of web design studio Stuff and Nonsense, and CSS guru, presented a preview of his new publication “Hardboiled web design“.
The main theme around his talk (and something that we put into practice at What!?) is top-down web design and development.
The styling and formating of marketing emails is a fine art, but many people are missing a key factor with their design and build that may make or break the user’s decision to view the email in its entirety…
We are all familiar with an email dropping in our inbox and appearing as blank white space:
The above image is an example of emails not being designed and built to work with images disabled. To help with explaining this process I have built a quick email to illustrate how alt tags can be styled, cells coloured, and text positioned to produce a professional looking email before any images have been downloaded. By using these techniques the user will be given an impression of the message, and an incentive to turn on images and view your email in it’s entirety.
For a long time Flash has held the market when it comes to unique and interesting interactive experiences on the web. But now, with jQuery becoming ever more popular a shift has become evident, and for good reason too!
Flash is a very good tool and you can do some amazing things with it, however, some of the fundamental aspects of web design and development are drastically improved when using jQuery.
jQuery is a free open source JavaScript library that has been designed to aid interaction on the Web. With the help of frameworks such as MooTools and Prototype, it has become very easy for simple JavaScript animations to be implemented with ease, and without any dreaded browser cross-compatibility issues.
We’ve been working really hard over the last couple of months on some really interesting projects and we thought it was about time that we shared some of our latest creations – some of which won’t be listed on the main website for a little while because they are a part of larger projects.
So, take a look, and let us know what you think!
Muddy Faces are a retailer of forest schools and outdoor activity equipment. We were approached to rebrand the company, update their image, and build the front end of their OS Commerce-based online shop.
Logo:
Website:
This site went live last week and it’s going down a treat! It’s such an improvement on what was there before and we hope that it continues to bring in more revenue for the client. It was a tricky little system to skin up but all in all the whole project went pretty smoothly.