today I finished a layout for a real estate website in photoshop. I also learned some really neat things about uses for photoshop tools i had not played with much, like the different modes for layers, in particular 'color' which only adds the color and not any of the texture from a layout. I am very impressed by people who can use a good number of the photoshop tools in their daily work, i hope to be one someday soon!

icky order forms

today designing our new website order form, i came i was very surprised to find out how many web design companies are doing using really poor coding principles to design their sites. And the worst offenders of all are the order forms. I realize that whether or not it is okay to use tables in forms is iffy. I personally don't do it. for me the same principles for the rest of the site hold true for the order form. things are harder to change and less flexible using tables in your design structure, unless you use them for what they intended. but what about rows and rows of non- breaking spaces to add in white space or little clusters of "break" tags and the "center" tag??

I know many people would wonder at my surprise, but this is what they are selling, shouldnt they 'put their best face forward' so to speak? or perhaps it does not matter, because anyone who would order from them, would likely not know what to look for anyways. hmm, seems wrong somehow....

today was spent on the interesting task of laying out the graphical elements of a website design. trying to make sure that it will have the ability to flexible enough to meet the needs it is likely to encounter, such as a limitless amount of content, and or, perhaps pages with very little content are important. for instance, will the footer stay at the bottom of the page? if there is a left or right navigation section, do background images abruptly end, or else repeat start over, repeatedly in a way that is not very visually appealing? these things are as important as well as how it appears in safari, internet explorer 5 and up opera firefox, because even if it looks nice on all these browsers now, it may not once it is employed and chocked full of content, doing what it was intended for.

I decided to use the web template I created yesterday for the seo site i needed to do today today, and glad i did, because i was able to find several issues with it in safari and internet explorer. it just goes to show what you learn when you actually put something into play.

ah the fun of designing something sort of from scratch with a bit more time can be taken on. it is a great thing to know how to do, to determine what you will need, figure out what system you will use, such as a content a management system, like if you do not know a good programming language (how can you not?? or yeah, i don't)throw around design and color ideas and basically be in a collaborative state of made. as is much with this job it is not something we have lots of time to plan out, but more then we often do joomla! which i have actually used many times or Drupal which i have only just started to familiarize myself with.

my day

today I finished up abed limousine and added his vehicle images and and an updated price list as well as his keywords. I did some correction work on a california realestate site. its not perfect but its better. I should have it completed before i leave. Daniel worked on the admin back end and showed me the usefulness of fieldsets. i got my review. Yay! and did an add to replace the 'talk now' logo on http://callrobyn.net/