Blog

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Firefox 3.0 upgrade

Leaving a reasonable time for addons, extensions and themes to catch up, we’ve now installed Firefox 3.0.

Immediately, an anomaly appeared on the front page of the Sibagraphics site – a bottom scroll bar. This turned out to be from the top flash animations, one of which was floated right and the other left from id css instructions within the objects themselves.

This was simply solved by removing the ids and putting them in divs around the objects!

The site validates and is similar in all browsers, even the annoying and insecure IE6 which 24% of viewers worldwide still apparently use. Many of these would be corporate users who have unique company software reliant on that dodgy old M$ version.

Rather than use the M$ Virtual PC software in order to run two versions of IE, we found the very handy free Tredisoft solution, which will install standalone versions of IE from IE3 – IE6 if desired. Works a treat and naturally is not bulky and cumbersome!

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Happy 2008

To all our many clients and friends, we wish much happiness and prosperity for the coming year! If you look closely, in the foreground you will see a hungry green critter who shared the solstice season with us sheltering from the wet, enjoying christmas cake.

Happy 2008
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New Wallpaper – Peacock and Flowers

Alistare at meEnjoy some of the new wallpaper we’ve added to our collection, from our recent photographic adventures in our own backyard.

These include two photos of Alistair, the peacock which has adopted us, a lovely white bauhinia, a butterfly obscured in a shrub, and a delicious elegant hippiastrum.

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Noosa Gondola wedding proposal and elopement

The Noosa Wedding Ring is always coming up with new, imaginative marriage options.

Their latest wedding package features a Gondola Elopement for two which includes a celebratory gondola cruise after your ceremony at a location of your choice. You can even choose to propose on a gondola on the Noosa River.

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WordPress 2.2.1 upgrade

Another successful and swift update completed for the Siblog. WordPress gets better and better – now with inbuilt sidebar widgets and a plethora of new plugins, this software is clean and convenient. And best of all, Google loves it!

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Flash Intros

The latest Site Reference newsletter reiterates the important rule we’ve known and abided by since we began our business in 1998 – DON’T USE FLASH INTROS no matter how much clients may insist, grovel and beg.

“Please, don’t use a Flash intro on your website. You’d think everyone would realise they’re a bad idea by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don’t seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and hated. Don’t be one of those people.”

Here’s a list of some of the reasons why flash intros and indeed why pure flash sites should be avoided at all costs.

  • Flash intros delay site visitors finding what they came for.
  • Gratuitous animation is superfluous.
  • Without html content, people without flash enabled will see nothing on visiting your site. Neither will search engines.
  • Flash design breaks the browser back button.
  • People who need to increase text size because of bad vision will not be able to do so with text integrated in flash. Use of html allows people to choose larger or smaller text sizes if they so desire.
  • Link colors don’t work so you can’t see where you’ve been and which links you’ve yet to visit.
  • The Find in Page browser feature won’t work.
  • Text translators won’t work.

To counter these problems, when animation is required and actually adds something to a site, we always include descriptors within the flash object tag, title tag, and noscript tag. The web page also will have ample text content including text navigation.

Just say NO to flash intros! (and to flash only sites).

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Sunshine Coast Photography by Nikki Bezel

Another revamp and recoding has been uploaded – the site of professional Sunshine Coast photographer, Nikki Bezel. Nikki’s specialties are photography of architecture, real estate and portraiture. He also provides electronic publications and photography for brochures for advertising.

Nikki’s site integrates xhtml and flash to allow search engines to spider the site fluidly.