Fine Web Design & Graphics
For several years, I played in Pirate Pete’s band, entertaining children at venues throughout South East Queensland, writing and recording songs. Pirate Pete is now based in New South Wales where he brings his pirate magic to schools and parties throughout the state.
I gave me old mate a hoy and recoded the splash page of his site to w3.org standards.
Talented health writer and natural therapist, Dominique Finney, now has a new site for her popular Medicine Room, where you can obtain health advice, herbs and purchase her botanically based Auradom organic skin care and beauty products.
Another restaurant for wedding reception venues joins the Noosa Wedding Ring. With a New Orleans atmosphere and rich timber decor, the Floating Boathouse Restaurant has the most delicious river views in Noosa.
The new site for Eurofilter Asia Pacific, who design, engineer and sell air filtration equipment, has been completed. Featuring CSS rollovers, the design of the site reflects the company’s logo, colour theme and solid presence in their industry niche.
Country and gospel singer Paul McCloud’s site has been chosen for archiving in the Australian National Library Archive.
This week, we made a photographic expedition from Rainbow Beach to Noosa through Cooloola National Park. Download some of the results which have been turned into desktop wallpaper of this beautiful wilderness close to home that we are lucky enough to enjoy.
Although IE only styled scroll bars can look ‘pretty’, I’ve lost patience with them because they are a proprietary, non-web standard addition which needs to be dodged round to ensure W3C CSS validation. And since IE only has 87% or thereabouts of the browser market these days and coloured scroll bars only work in DTD Quirks mode … why bother.
Here’s how I include them when desired, in a way that permits validation. Firstly, use a free visual scroll bar styling program like this online tool or this one and obtain the scroll bar css. Then convert it to javascript (HTML Kit has a nifty plugin that does it with a click of a button), save it with a .js file extension and link it in the head of your markup document/s.
<script language="JavaScript" xsrc="js/css.js" mce_src="js/css.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Collecting fonts is one of my passions. I was most pleased to stumble across Fontleech, a blog devoted to fonts. The site continuously alerts its readers to and catalogues a range of free font sources I haven’t discovered before as well as some beloved old ones, including the archives of the prolific and luminal font designer Manfred Klein.
At 45 Berea Street, I found a well-written article which summarises important points for effective search engine optimisation which Sibagraphics already employs in its site design. The article emphasises the need to implement search engine strategies from the ground up … through site structure, valid coding, useful metatags and page content.
No problems updating the Siblog to WordPress 1.5 …. I managed to retain all mods with no problem. With any luck the spammers will be frustrated further.
While I was at it, I’ve updated Sibagraphics and client forums … slightly more complex but very worthwhile. I’ve also implemented some considerable css compression by (1) converting all hex colours to shorthand names eg. #003366 becomes #036, and (2) including line-height sizes in font styles eg. font: italic bold .75em/1.2em verdana, sans-serif.