In the 2005 Queensland Restaurant & Catering Awards, Maleny Manor, premier venue for Queensland weddings, has won Function/Convention Centre Catering and Caterer of the Year.
Mike Jackson – Australian Family Entertainment
Sibagraphics has completed the code revamp and optimisation for the site of famous Australian children’s and family entertainer, Mike Jackson. Well known for his Dr Knickerbocker song, Mike is now launching his new Uke ‘n Play book and CD kit.
The site has been upgraded to a 3 column div layout in XHTML 1.0 which has streamlined the markup, reducing page size and loading times. Pages have been individually metatagged and matched with content.
LimePlus site
Soil enrichment specialists, LimePlus have launched their new site which promotes their supply, delivery and spreading of organic and inorganic fertilisers on the Sunshine Coast.
The site employs advanced CSS list rollovers and positioning.
Learn About Web Pages
For those wishing to learn a new skill or revise their learning, Westciv is commencing their excellent free basic lessons in HTML and CSS. A new lesson is released every week.
Graphic Design Bugbears
There’s a very funny and applicable list of gripes which will be familiar to most graphic designers at Adland.
My favourites are
15. If three designs are shown to a client, your least favorite will be chosen or any combination of worst components of each.
16. If two designs are shown, a third will be requested. If provided, then one of the first two will be chosen.
And there’s more notes about bad design projects at Andy Budd’s blog.
Maleny Manor wins
Again, Maleny Manor has excelled in the ABIA awards, taking out the Golden awards for 2005 for both ceremony and reception venue. This top wedding venue was also finalist for Best Function Co-ordinator. Congratulations to Marlene and Simon!
National Library Archive
Country and gospel singer Paul McCloud’s site has been chosen for archiving in the Australian National Library Archive.
Styled Scroll Bars
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>
Font sources
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.
Web design and SEO
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.