Omar Aviles

Blogging a wordpress on the iphone

July 26th, 2010 No Comments

This is a test post on my iPhone to post a message to my wordpress site. It’s amazing how far we can go with limitations and stretch them to they snap. From rubbing sticks to make fire through the right brothers making a airplane.

The love affair of IE6

May 12th, 2010 No Comments

In preparing for a job interview for web designer/ webdeveloper I notice during phone interviews and face to face the Name IE 6 is mention. It’s like the stepchild that nobody wants to deal with. Of course IE 6 is still used by many organizations and people. How silly of them to operate on such a hideous browser.

Here is a great articleon handling some major issues with ie6 when coding html.

Rounded Corners – Buttons Love

May 12th, 2010 No Comments

I was recently on a phone interview and was asked about buttons. The questions was:

What are some ways you design and develop buttons on your html pages?

I drew a blank because I have not really use rounded corners. So I did what everyone does: Google it!

Here is a great and quick tutorial on how this author uses rounded corners.

Basically its a Div and then inside the Div are five nested Div’s. Then using the power of css, the Div’s are position using the background property and negative values. I have not try it yet, but I like the fact when I read the author’s article that it works on ie 6. Yes the browser with special needs.

Measuring up

February 25th, 2010 No Comments

Hi I know it has been a while so let us begin.

The ruler is a tool use everywhere in work. We use rulers to measure,wood,metal, buildings, liquid, magazines, and websites.

So how do we measure websites? well, this might need to be ask again. How do we measure the width and height of elements. Well, their is a great firefox plugin name MeasureIt. This firefox extension was created by Kevin Freitas. Currently I have been using it to measure websites elements and see how they fit on a page. Since I’m on a laptop and my screen width is 1280px by 800px. On my wordrpess dashboard it is actually 1264 because of the scroll bar on the right side.

So after you click on MeasureIt link above and install it on your firefox browser, you might be asking yourself where is the tool at? Well it is located on the bottom left hand side of your browser. You should see this image

At first it is grey, but when you click on it, the color changes to a light brown or tan. I’m on PC Windows Vista, so it might be different on a mac. Now drag your cursor on the screen across and you will see a light box ruler go across with the measurement of px(means pixels) with H(Height) and W(width).

Here is an example of me dragging it across the screen to measure the this.

As you can see this tool is definitely a useful tool. Here are my opinions marks:

tool is transparent blue so it makes it easy to view
easy to move tool on the screen
Can only keep one measure at a time, which maybe their will be an update to do as many you like

The ruler seems like a simple object, but it has uses. Of course the ruler idea is in adobe dreamweaver, flash, photoshop, illustrator and indesign. But it is also useful when creating web pages to measure images elements, div elements, headers, footers and side bars elements as well.

If they are techniques that you use for this ruler, I would love to hear how you use it for web design and development.

Needing Design Inspiration when all is dark

January 3rd, 2010 No Comments

Risk: Godstorm!

With the Holidays coming to the near end, I’m overwhelm with the vast quantity of media that is available to use as a resource when it comes to print and web design. As of late, I have been visiting Barnes and Noble and digesting all forms of inspiration. First off I found the board game Risk: Godstorm. My eyes caught the artwork. Viewing Zeus and the Norse god ,Thor on the box cover, develop a impulse to buy this game. Then I began to further investigate this game and all it’s components. In designing a board game I took notice of the work that went into it:

Mythology information: Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Celtic, Babylonian stories
Characters that will attract customers such as Zeus and Thor
A product already known, but just changing the appearance.
The pieces of the game well design and board game itself
Strong images of characters, thus artwork was important for the sale of this piece as well
Being a social game, where you need at least 2 players to play

After trying to setup the game which took nearly 2 hours with anticipation, I found that my appetite for action and make believe war between the gods was not going to happen this Christmas eve. However, I was not going to give up. I found myself, thinking of how to make this game happen, so that I may have visions and reenact the battle of the gods. You see, the image on the box had a profound effect on me. Products must have a everlasting visual for a strong effect on customers.

Now, I found myself searching for mythology art,stories and have now included mythology into my design inspiration. I found that I want to learn to paint or create those images like on the cover box.

Getting the creative wheels turning

November 30th, 2009 No Comments

It was a sunday afternoon and I was in wordpress land trying to read another blog about designing themes, when I decided to take a break. Then it hit me. I have no motivation to make a revised layout, design, colors, fonts for my personal site. Yuck. I needed to do something. This is when the process for creation began for me. I decided to walk around my neighborhood of Park Slope, brooklyn and take pictures. Pictures of anything that I found interesting. Then another idea came into my head. Why don’t I make up a day and call it Sepia Day. As you can read, I was making this all up and it got me excited. As I started to take pictures of various things. I started seeing patterns in everyday living. I saw street signs and fonts. I saw color in a new way. Shapes where more interesting and the element of being able to psychically touch it put a new dimension in the way I was thinking of designing my website. Here are a couple of tools that I use to help me get that web or print project started for inspiration:

Outdoor edition:

coffe or tea or water
mp3 player: ipod or scandisk or coby or any audio device for music, speech, or just audio sounds
digital camera
notebook or pad and pen or pencil
a quick stop around 20 to 30 minutes at barnes and nobles and look at various book covers and magazines

Then another idea came into my thought process, why don’t I experiment and put the pictures into a slideshow and show the world what I saw on Sepia day. Below is the start of slideshow done in Microsoft movie maker. I know it is not top of the line software, but I first needed to try it out before I could make any assumptions and criticize the software. It fairly simple in terms of putting a picture, a timeline, effects, transitions, and the ability to put audio and text makes it useful. But that is whole another posting about user interfaces and applications.

The final step that I implemented was to make my slideshow viral and so I posted on my free youtube account. Below is my first attempt at Sepia Day and Slideshow.

Should I put Flash on my homepage?

November 12th, 2009 No Comments

Let me start by saying I have little experience with putting flash on homepages. My experience with flash has been to make a photo slide show for an artist on CD, not for web.

So, when it comes to flash, I do have opinions on how and when to use it. Here are some:

When to use it:

1) For wii games ( a simple game could be a good marketing angle to promote your service or products)

2) Slider Show for your powerpoint presentation( make sure it works and tests it before you actually go to the place)

3) Eye candy, Eye candy, Eye candy. (when you want to impress your artistic, creavite and programming skills )

When Not to use it:

1) When making the whole home page in flash..as the user waits for it to load…and look another ” click here to enter” link….Didnt we already enter the site?

2) Navigation. So you made an amazing website and the horizontal and vertical navigation bars are in flash…but wait, I cant see them because I dont have the latest flash player…So now I have to download it and go back again…wait did I download the right one (can possibly happen).

3) Just for the sake of it in terms of a small business (1 person who sells jewlery, art, or service).

Here is a interesting quick read on the Case Against Flash

SEO – Marketing

November 11th, 2009 1 Comment

Here are some marketing tools that I have been using this past August to hopefully boost pageviews on the Brooklyn Indie Market website that I manage.

Marketing Tools :

* Google Analytics - This a must have tool. This displays your visitors views, bounce rate, time on a page, new visitors, loyal visitors, where your visitors are landing and where from. In addition, it has 4 goals that you can put to see if your visitors are getting to them. One goal example is to have Vendors signups, so I set the goal on the vendors page and if they do a the required action it will show on the analytics. But their is so much more. Google has a dashboard where you can display to your liking what stats you want to see from your website. Comparisons features which I just started to understand. Although I did not go into great detail about the tool furthermore , you should have this tool for it is essential for your SEO Marketing goals.
* Google webmaster tools – A vital tool to help you with meta tags, seeing queries about how users are looking for you in the google search engine and setting up a site map which is important for google to rank you as well.
* Social websites- Facebook, twitter, myspace, technorati, wordpress,blogger just to point out the popular ones are very important to have if you want your business to be seen by the millions of people on the web. I also would like to include delicious and digg as well. All these websites have a powerful tool. That power is social networking. Make friends on facebook and myspace. Then send out maybe at least once a week a event going on in your business. Twitter it daily. Blog about it on blogger or wordpress, or if you want to see if it worth it to blog on both sites and see if you get more visitors hits, try that. I’m have been experimenting with that and will let you know how that is going. As for stumble upon which is a website that is like bookmark app, it lets you comment about other people sites and share your likes and dislikes. I have at least commented(positive comments only) at 10 sites a day for like 5 days a week. When you do the numbers that is like 50 comments which leave your website link if people do decide to see who you are. In a month It could be 200 comments and that is more chance of people going to your website because of the comment you left. I also been trying technorati which is basically following blogs and putting them as favorites. I have not been able to figure out a simple way that this site can help me with traffic to my brooklyn indie market blog yet. Since this is my first time experimenting with this, I will also let you know how that is going.
* Press Release – This is not exactly my strong point. I can barely write correct english and not forget about past tense rules. Sitting for half an hour to one hour and write a rough draft about an event you want to promote. After you have done that, revised, revised, revised and spell check, make sure the address of the event, time, name of people and even it makes sense to you. Look at the press release and ask yourself: would I understand this? is it quick and to the point? Here is a website to get you started on more rules. OK, now that you have your final polish press release what are you going to do with it? send it out of course. Post it on your site. Send it your local newspapers or city papers. But who do I exactly send it to in the local newspapers? Go your local newspaper site and look for a contact link or page and send it to them stating you would like to send our your press release so people are aware of your event. Try at least 30- 50 newspaper and blog sites in your local area. Again try, try, try and do not be discourage, it will take some time to build a relationship with these other organizations.
* Have clean Xhtml and css code using w3C standards – this is the defacto of web standards right now. Using their validation tool will put you on the right track for google search engine spiders to find you without errors. It is free and I like to use it. It makes me feel good that I wrote up good code and it follows structure, unlike my English grammar. Also check your css validation tool as well.
* Meta Keywords and Meta Description – In your xhtml code you should have at least 40 meta keywords that describe your site. I have been changing at 10 or adding 10 keywords a month and monitoring on google anayltics to see if any users found us through such words. I believe you can have up to 100 keywords, but not sure as of this posting. I will get back to you on that as well.
* Track your work – I use google docs to track what websites I left a blog message or what site I left a positive comment using stumbleupon(check out my last posting on this matter). In addition, I keep track of how many social sites I have and have one document containing the url, username and password info. That way I can come back just in case I cant remember what site I should do my seo on that half hour or hour.
* Get your webiste listed on dmoz, yahoo(read 8 ways to do this),and of course google.

Web Design Solutions

Outdoor edition: