AU Blogspot

              Thanks to Heidi Kuisma for permission to use this Photo.

“Get The Glass” is an interactive flash website oriented around animation, gaming, and oddly enough: milk.  In fact, it’s actually a microsite developed for the Got Milk? marketing campaign, a campaign that never seems to run out of money by the way.  It must be working.  The interactive gaming component has certainly crossed over into mainstream marketing strategies, so all of our student web design students should take note of what makes this site a success.  You’ll notice the flash applications are not groundbreaking by any means, and they’re not intended to be; the focus is on the execution of the site’s message.  Because the designers understood how to use interactivity as a tool to communicate rather than an end in itself, “Get The Glass” was recognized as one of 2007’s top microsites.  Personally, I don’t want to drink more milk, which probably means that I’m already the victim of some other campaign, probably for grape soda.

Ryan Rode
Interactive Services Manager
Ashworth University

We decided it was time to perform some spring cleaning on our Myspace page, and with that we spent an afternoon on our Apple iBook G4, mashing up some HTML and CSS to make create our new sophisticated Myspace theme.

We first created this page in iWeb (available only on Mac OS), because iWeb allowed us to apply the reflection effect to our images quickly and easily. We then imported our site into Adobe (formely Macromedia) Dreamweaver. In Dreamweaver, we were able to incorporate our friends list, and comment box. Once completed, we uploaded our files to a webserver.

It’s tricky coding CSS. We had to first start off by creating an overlay to cover up the default myspace theme. Then we applied our HTML and CSS to our container DIV. There were a few quirks we had to workaround, but in the end we were able to create a nice theme for our Myspace presence. It’s a shame that it is only best viewed in Firefox.

When we get a chance, we’ll upload the steps as a PDF download for those who would like to create their own Apple-esque Theme for Myspace.

Jubril Olayiwola
Web Content Manager
Ashworth University

          Thanks to Robert Marinkovic for permission to use this Photo.

Cascading Stylesheets, or CSS, can be pretty awkward at times. It allows you total control over the presentation of a webpage within a browser; but having the resulting webpage look identical in each different browser (IE, FireFox, et al) can sometimes be difficult. Here’s a selection of handy tips I’ve found - see if they help you too.

100.01% Font Size

CSS: Getting Into Good Coding Habits says:

This odd 100.01% value for the font size compensates for several browser bugs. First, setting a default body font size in percent (instead of em) eliminates an IE/Win problem with growing or shrinking fonts out of proportion if they are later set in ems in other elements. Additionally, some versions of Opera will draw a default font-size of 100% too small compared to other browsers. Safari, on the other hand, has a problem with a font-size of 101%. The current “best” suggestion is to use the 100.01% value for this property.

Link Styling: “Love/Hate

Link Specifity says:

All of them can apply to a hyperlink, and in some cases, more than one will apply. For example, an unvisited link can be hovered and active at the same time as it’s an unvisited link. Since three of the above rules apply to the hyperlink, and the selectors all have the same specificity, then the last one listed wins. Therefore, the “active” style will never appear, because it will always be overridden by the “hover” style. (more…)

Ever walked around and see a terrible designed poster on the wall? Now you can take action with the Design Police. They have up to 5 different templates of stickers that will apply to possibly any design mistake people can make. Really nice idea, and I will surely print out some of these suckers!

Frederik Samuel
Creator of adgoodness
Ashworth University Contributing Blogger

*Frederik Samuel is an art director/designer working out of Toronto, Canada. Through his blog, adgoodness, Frederik comprehensively covers the best and worst advertising and design from around the globe. We’re excited to have Frederik Samuel as a member of our contributing bloggers’ network and would like to sincerely thank him for his generosity. Thanks Frederik!

Sony Ericsson has recently launched a colorful global mini-site to promote its new W910i and W580 models. Everything is conceived around a rather psychedelic experience that mixes music and colors and allows users to create unique and personalized kaleidoscopes.

It’s a nice site, and apparently a lot of people have already created their own kaleidoscope.

(more…)

 
                  Thanks to Lyndal for permission to use this Photo.
 
As a web designer/developer, one role often required is to secure adequate web hosting for the website(s) you’ve been assigned to build. The kind of hosting you should pick should certainly be matched to the website — any colossal site rolled out for a new corporate product would not be hosted on a super budget hosting plan. But you shouldn’t go overboard and use hosting that is too advanced for the project either, especially if your client has a limited budget. In this post I’ll discuss the various types of web hosting available to better inform you. I’d love to hear your views too.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting, also often called virtual hosting, is where your website is stored in it’s own directory on a web server which, generally speaking, hosts between a hundred and a thousand websites in total. Having this many different websites on one server means the costs of being hosted are kept to a minimum, but there are physical limitations imposed on you.

Pros: