Macronimous Web Design

Do you work on CSS and like to know more about what you might have to learn to keep you up in the phase?. This slideshow gives you an intro to make you ready.

View more documents from Andy Budd.

Today I revived few questions from Carl Williams of Odin Jobs for a blog entry. I believe every designer should ask themselves to keep the answers with them always.
1. When and how did you get started in web design?
2. What is the single most important attribute/skill a good web designer must have?
3. What hard and soft skills should a web designer have? Should he/she have a degree or can you be self taught?
4. Your opinions on:
a. Fixed width or Fluid Design?
b. EMS, percentage, pixels or points?
5. What tools are a must have in a good web designer’s arsenal?
6. Any advice to budding and beginning web designers?
I am sure you will find yourself interesting in your job, if you have the right answers.
I welcome your answers as comments.

Following the best four series, this time I have chosen 4 sites to find wonderful and useful Photoshop plugins and filters. Though there are thousands of sites offering free Photoshop plugins and filters, searching through the sites and choosing the ones required could be a tedious affair. Am sure this list would prove to be a quick reckoner for all your Photoshop plugins and filters needs, because I have chosen them after trying them out myself. All these sites offer free downloads of filters and plugins, with a huge variety of options to choose from. 

Filter Factory 

This site has a huge accumulation of filters and plugins as well, that impart varying levels of effects in photographs and images. With more than 350 filters and plugins available, this site definitely contains a vast and excellent collection to its credit. With detailed explanation of what plugins and filters are and how to download them are clearly explained in the site as well.

http://www.photoshop-filters.com/html/filter_factory.htm 

VanDerLee plugins and filters 

A site with both free and paid versions, VanDerLee has an impressive collection of Photoshop filters and plugins. Along with latest news in the field of website designing and releases of various new versions of plugins and filters, the site also has a dedicated Support section that assists with useful FAQs and a list of Compatible applications that work with the site’s plugins.  

http://www.vanderlee.com/plugins.html  

Richard Rosenman filters and plugins 

This site has separate windows for both freeware and commercial collection that can be downloaded at a specified cost. Wonderful, amazing and varied collections of plugins and filters are available in the freeware section as well. A must checkout site for all Photoshop plugins and filters seeking fans!  

http://www.richardrosenman.com/software/downloads 

Mehdi Plugins 

A great site for Photoshop plugins, this site has a colorful and eye pleasing layout in itself! Not only does the site has a large collection of plugins, but it also has clear explanations as to how to use the particular plugin and also how to customize them in order to make it the way you need it. I have used this site for many of my plugin needs as well. Excellent site indeed! 

http://www.mehdiplugins.com

Apart from these four, I also happened to see a site called Virtual Photographer. A very useful site for creating special effects on photos, downloads are available in zip format as well. A site worth checking out for the photographer in you http://www.optikvervelabs.com/default.asp

A guest book allows you to keep a check on who is been visiting your website.
Getting feedback becomes all the more easy with the all-new guest book from Macronimous.

Forget boring forms. The real difficulty in getting feedback is to push the visitor to leave behind little information.  The fun to use guest book from Macronimous tempts your user to enter and record his visit to your website. The exiting new guest book gives you the feel and effect of real book by allowing you to flip pages. Whatever information the user gives looks cool on the guest book, which automatically inspires him to leave an impression behind.

You can also get the freedom to delete unwanted entries. Change textures and colors with the slightest possible effort. Customise the guest book to your taste and need.

The new flash guest book is easy intergratable with your website. The annoying coding can be done away with. A few clicks will get the new guest book right into your website. You don’t have to be a computer geek to get your guest book fixed.

Please look at flash guest book screenshots below,

Flip to open pages:

The flash powered guest book is totally secure giving you 100% Spam protection. It is XHTML based, so you get the complete guest book on any browser. The coding is minimal , so you can still retain your web page light weight.

Macronimous also goes a step further in making sure you get your feedback precisely by maintain your guest book for you.

Get this cool new flash guest book from Macronimous and send your feedback to us. Download it for free, click here.

WordPress is a simple and handy platform that is highly used in creating blogs and is also one of my favorite blog platforms, WordPress plugins that are used along with it can create excellence to sites. Out of many WordPress plugins that are available, I have chosen 4 that are my darlings, from the Multimedia point of view. These plugins are highly useful with regards to creating Multimedia-rich websites and blogs, and I also am of the impression that they are simple to use, without any complications or hassles.

(1) Kaltura Video recording and management – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kaltura-interactive-video 

This plugin is quite apt to make the videos in your blog more interactive. With facilities like uploading, importing and recording of videos into your blog posts,  modify videos with the help of an online video editor; this plugin is definitely a hit! What I like the best in this is that it this plugin also supports a huge variety of codecs and audio/video file formats along with video sharing options. In short, complete management and administration of videos is possible with this wizard! 

(2) MTR Audio and Podcast Recorder - http://www.podcastingnews.com/2008/09/15/free-podcast-recorder-plugin-for-wordpress
 

I would say a “must-download plugin” for the Podcast freaks; this plugin is called the MTR Podcast recorder that allows all the recordings to be saved in MP3 format. It is saved in the same server as that of WordPress. The best part that I like in this plugin is that it allows handling the records and musical selection lists from the WordPress administration itself. This helps in easy playlists management and overall blog site administration. 

(3) NextGEN Photo Gallery – http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery

One of my most favorites, this photo gallery plugin is very useful, especially for those interested in creating and sorting their own image collections. This plugin has a tinge of Web 2.0 and jQuery JavaScript library, all packed in one. The users can also upload images that have watermarked text or images. The best thing is that various JavaScript effects like Thickbox, Lightbox and the likes can be used. 

(4) Kimili Embedded Flash – http://kimili.com/plugins/kml_flashembed
 

So you want to embed flash based movies into your blog, then Kimili is the best choice! A very flexible plugin with many features attached to it, the Kimili  also complies with the standards. It is very useful for search engine optimization of blogs, as the plugin itself is search engine friendly. What’s more, this plugin also gels on well with other plugins in its 1.2 version, and hence is definitely the best pick for WordPress.

I have found these plugins to be remarkable and of great use to me. There are many more great plugins from WordPress, and if you feel anyone or more of them have stirred your web designing senses, then do not forget to suggest about them in my comments section.

In a survey, by the Information Architecture Institute, 47.6% of people says “My CMS is not flexible enough to accommodate my design”, as a key issue they face with many Opensource CMSs available in the market. This made me to think about the truth behind this. What prevents them from making a great design for their CMS driven site? Is it the CMS they’ve chosen or they customization skills they lack?

When we offer consulting for Opensource CMS selection, it is not an easy job always. Building websites with the CMS our clients like and to make it work with our own custom design might become a nightmare if we aren’t considering and planning the UI design in advance.

We have customers who supply design for their web sites (as Photoshop source files – if they know Photoshop) since they have good sense of designing and they know how their site should look like. We can happily accept it and build HTML/XHTML and CSS based Static pages without any issues or provide a Custom written CMS easily. The real challenge starts when they want to make their site CMS enabled with an Opensource CMS framework such as Joomla, WordPress or Drupal.

Most of the opensource CMS applications strictly adopt some design standards, and they give clear instructions for UI designing. Your design will not work well with the CMS, if it does not obey their design rules. The primary reason for these strict rules is to help with the CMS applications for design-content separation and for easy user interface maintenance. You can easily change the design without changing the programming sections and vice versa. But can you easily fit your custom design which is created as your mind wishes to an Opensource CMS application? Most of the good CMS applications does not allow you to create an unique site with your own custom design, custom graphics and custom XHTML.

Simply configuring a Opensource CMS application along with a template design (meant for that CMS application) may ease your job, But it will not give your client an user interface, which is unique for them. It will look like one another site made with that particular CMS. I have seen several Ecommerce sites with similar structures; I can easily identify them as “made with osCommerce without added efforts”.

So, how do we deal with this situation?

Take the case of WordPress. If you start designing a site without keeping WordPress in mind, and wanted to enable WordPress CMS at later stage, I am sure you need much experience in XHTML coding  you may have to give up WordPress in order to keep your look and feel remain unchanged.

Few months earlier, we did an Ecommerce web site design with Cubecart; with the help of Programmers and good HTML scripter, we were able to make the user interface which is very unique and no template look. Yes, good PHP and HTML programmers will have to give hands to change the way the application works and to fit your custom design with the CMS. If you need a decent design which does not offer you a standard template based site look, you need an experienced team’s support to make it possible.

Cost is one key factor why people like to use opensource applications and in most of the cases we almost get a free solution. Installing Drupal or Joomla with a pre-existing design, will only help you to offer a cheaper solution, But to give a unique look and feel to your site, you must be ready to invest in application customization too. Your CMS theme or template will need your programmer’s support to provide coherent CMS driven website, which is exclusive for the customer.

Opensource CMS applications are excellent tools for professional web solutions. No objections!. Opensource CMS applications will not cut the cost of custom development completely and making a design which has an exclusive and aesthetic look to your customer will need the time/cost of your developers and designers.  Don’t leave the CMS application to decide your site user interface by cutting the customization efforts.