Get know Invicta

17 Dec

Posted at 21:00h in Get know Invicta

I'm a big fan of Parallax effects on websites. Apparently these originate in early video games. My hippy parents were banned video games from our house when I was young so I missed out, but I think its really cool on websites. I've been playing around with pure CSS parallax ideas, but here is a really comprehensive guide to Javascript parallax  effects, which area alot more interactive than the CSS stuff I've been doing.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_6lV7X3DLo...

16 Dec

Posted at 03:11h in Get know Invicta

From what I've seen of html5, the thing I really like is the new tags, which make clean leaner and more semantic. Here is a quick cheat guide to some of the more useful tags:   <body> <header></header> <nav></nav> <article> <section></section> </article> <aside></aside> <footer></footer> </body>   In order for these to work in Internet Explorer, you need to add this to the head of your pages: <!--[if lt IE 9]> <script> document.createElement('header'); document.createElement('nav'); document.createElement('section'); document.createElement('article'); document.createElement('aside'); document.createElement('footer'); </script> <![endif]--> <!--[if lt IE 9]> <script src="//html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script> <![endif]--> You also need to this to your CSS: header, nav, section, article, aside, footer { display:block; }...

14 Dec

Posted at 22:42h in Get know Invicta

Using grids is a classic design concept, and using them is a great way to see big improvements in the quality of a design. I've been wanting to incorporate more solid grids into my UI Designs, and I have discovered a couple of great tools for doing this.   The first is the 960 Grid System by Nathan Smith. There are templates for Photoshop and Fireworks in various grid sizes, as well as app plugins for a similar effect.I'm now using this on every project I do.   The second is the awesome Google Chrome extensions called Grrrid. This allows you to overlay a grid onto a website you are looking at in a browser window. Download it here...

07 Dec

Posted at 18:35h in Get know Invicta

I remember the first time I tried making a Wordpress site locally and uploading it to a live server, all hell broke loose. It's actually pretty easy, and while there are different approaches, I follow the process outlined in a blog post here....

06 Dec

Posted at 01:35h in Get know Invicta

I'm on a mission. The forrest is thick, but I see the egde in site, and I believe soon I will be free of spam. I'm fighting the good fight on four fronts:   1) I'm using an invisible field in the forms of my website. By having a field on your form that is hidden through CSS and/or Javascript, humans will not fill out this field. Bots on the other hand will be reading the code and will fill this field out. Then its a matter of setting up the form so that filling this field out prevents the form from sending.   2) I'm using Thunderbirds abilities to deal with Spam. I would like to know more about this, but what I did was go into the Junk Settings inside of Account Settings, and configured it for maximum anti-spam aggression.   3) I'm using ev (at) everetdale.com rather than uh, the normal way of displaying an email address.   4) I'm using the Akismet wordpress plugin. This stops spam coming in through the comments feilds on my blog.   I'm also interested in blocking IP addresses. I actually don't have a clue how to do this at the moment, but I wouldn't mind banning the worst offenders. If you have more ideas to prevent spam, please leave a comment!...

29 Nov

Posted at 22:19h in Get know Invicta

I've decided that when I come across a website that really blows me away, I should mention it on my blog. This website is flawless responsive design in my opinion. Apparently these guys are all about joomla, which actually makes me consider returning to the CMS I used to be so into.     ...

20 Nov

Posted at 23:36h in Get know Invicta

Being a visual designer who does a bit of code, making sites in Wordpress can be a bit of a pain in some ways compared to a non-CMS website. A big realization for me was to view the source code of my project, and see the code being output, rather than the PHP files. Wordpress creates a bunch of classes that you can apply styles to. One thing I like to do is create a style for an active menu item, which helps the user know where on the website they are. Here is an example of applying an active state to a Wordpress menu item:   #menu li.current-menu-item a { color: #CE0000; }...

19 Nov

Posted at 21:51h in Get know Invicta

If your looking for a good web hosting company, I recommend Hostgator, who has great support, and uses Cpanel. Sign up using this link, and they'll send me a little love:   http://secure.hostgator.com/~affiliat/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=everet...

05 Oct

Posted at 04:05h in Get know Invicta

At least 25 pages Each page optimized for 1 or 2 words page titles: 8-10 words unique title for every page Use seperators A headline, not a title Use a primary keyword and a secondary keyword for everypage Three words for homepage Meta tags: 25 to 30 words Meta description: should make sense to human reader MEta keywords: 7 to 10 words, different for every page. USe one h1 tag per page USe primary keyword in H1 tag name images using keywords alt tags: 70 to 80 characters Use keyword in anchor tags in inbound links ...