KEEPING THE WEB IN CHECK

When I first started developing in Visual Studio I was under the impression that I was going to be without the use of SASS for my projects, and that there wasn’t a way to have it run within the IDE. I was distraught to think that I would have to go back to authoring vanilla CSS without variables, mixins, functions, etc… I could not conceive of running a project as efficiently minus the employment of SASS. I knew there had to be some way to do this in VS, and someone out there has already figured it out.

I recently converted my personal website from Wordpress to Drupal; Wordpress is a rich CMS experience, but it has its limitations and technical deficiencies. When I invested my time in Drupal years ago, I was blown away by the vast amount of development possibilities. The concepts of themes, modules(plugins), users, and Content types are all in Wordpress, but to a relatively limited degree. The empowering force of Drupal is that it’s a Content Management Framework(CMF) to build Content Management Systems(CMS). Basically, you can use Drupal to solve any strategic pain point since you are the one creating the CMS.

I am not trying to trash Wordpress, as there are different needs for different projects that can only be determined case-by-case. At the moment, Drupal is the solution for my development needs, and I just can’t see myself going back to Wordpress... but who knows what will happen in the year 3030? Only Deltron zero, hero, not no small feat.

I just completed a new website for an amazing organization located here in my hometown of Sarasota, Florida: West Coast Martial Arts Academy(WCMAA). WCMAA has been teaching martial arts in Sarasota, Florida since 1979, they hold the highest standards with a commitment to excellence that is unsurpassed.

Plugins don't usually get me all that excited, but this one definitely does. One of my friends at work just turned me on to this new panel for Adobe Fireworks called "Tables". This is a big time-saver if you have a lot of designs with table data. You can create tables directly in Adobe Fireworks, or import TXT or CSV tabular data files that are already formatted, then change the styles with ease.

I have fallen in LUST with Responsive Web Design, my iPhone and I can’t get enough of websites interfacing our queries while they dress all CSS-SEXY for us. I love the fact that many companies are now catering to my 320px fetish; many of today’s websites are even designed to fit my viewport all the way to my max-device-width. You may SCREAM the “safe word”, but mobile devices won’t stop using more bandwidth globally until we all “get off” our phones.

The Interweb “as we really know it” began as a small pond of ambitious servers in the 1990′s. Dial-up internet access was cumbersome, it took a lifetime just to load a web page. Now in the 21st century, the Interwebs have become a vast ocean of data. We can surf the seas at the speed of fiber optic light from the comfort of our own homes, or at our favorite fishing hole via smart phone technologies. The speed and bandwidth of today is amazing, and it is only gaining momentum.

Sometimes a few of the more important web site fundamentals get lost in the launch of a client’s project. These things range anywhere from a browser’s favicon image to the web site’s analytic performance tracking solution. All of the main core deliverables need to be the responsibility of the technology service entity and/or “cousin that makes them web sites on them there interwebs“. One of the most commonly missed core deliverables I have come across is the integration of Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.

The number one search engine in the world is Google, obviously there is no question of that. The number two search engine may or may not surprise you, but it is YouTube. I know…what a shock that people would rather watch a video than read, but video brings a lot of value to the table […]

Building a web site optimized for the iPhone can be really fun and super easy. All one needs to do is load the iPhone CSS via the media type and load 300 DPI images for retina display iPhones... All pretty simple. I wanted to launch my new web site with a mobile version, of course time always wins out and I had to wait a week. I finally launched an iPhone version and have Droid and Blackberry versions on the way.

Google analytics makes it easy to track user actions. Google event tracking empowers you to track events that may not result in a page view, but are important user behaviors that will impact and guide your UX design.