First Phase for New Photo Site: the Wireframes

Wireframes are very helpful when coding a website because you’re able to see the elements and figure out how to create them. But wireframes are especially useful for the first step of web design. When designing a web site, wireframes allow designers to see how pages will work and if elements go together.   They’re also useful to show clients. If a client doesn’t like something on the page, there isn’t too much time wasted on redesigning it. It also minimizes the distractions. A client might think the colors don’t go well or the fonts are unreadable on a design mockup and dislike the entire design. The client (and sometimes designer) will be less likely to want to continue the design even if the elements on the page are working.

Minimally Minimal Minimalism

Minimalism is exactly what it sounds like: minimal.  Minimalist designs strip everything away except for the essentials.  It focuses on the main element with no other distractions.  If there are no distractions, the design, whether it’s a site, movie poster, or ad, will be able to get its main message or objective across.  Every element is meticulously thought over in a minimalist design.  If there is any type, the choice in typeface, size, color, placement, and especially words all matter.  If there are any images or graphic elements, they need to be important and used for a reason.  Space, or rather negative space, is heavily utilized in minimal design.  Some designers believe that only white space should be used in minimalism, others allow negative space with color.

Geolocation with the Ministry of Magic

Geolocation is a JavaScript API for HTML5 that allows a webpage to identify the location of a visitor, which makes the page “location aware”. The user’s location can be shown on the page in coordinates or it can be shown on a map, or both.  If the user is moving, the location will be updated in real time. The script can also find the distance between the user’s location and another location anywhere in the world.

Domain Hosting – Beware of EIG

Choosing a web hosting service was fairly straightforward – until it wasn’t. Registering a domain and signing up for hosting is pretty much the same across the board, but finding the right sites to sign with is the issue.

There are of course, the popular sites that everyone’s heard of, like GoDaddy, where you can buy a domain and host a site with the same service. But, like a lot of large companies, there is a misconception that because a company is large, it will provide better quality and service. When it was time to find my own domain, I didn’t want to start with the bigwigs.  Instead, I searching for other sites and found reviews, including one from PC Mag – who I thought was generally reliable. After narrowing down to two hosting services and looking for individual reviews, HostGator was the winner.

Finally connecting with Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a vector based program, so it’s used to design objects that need to be scaled while keeping the same quality, such as a logo which can be large enough to fit on a billboard or small enough to fit on a tag. A lot of people, including myself, tend to use Photoshop for almost anything, even though the program is mainly for editing and manipulating photos. Photoshop was more familiar to me, but now that I’ve worked with Illustrator, I won’t need to use PS when the situation doesn’t call for it.

The ups and mostly downs of installing Ubuntu

Installing Ubuntu on my old 2008 HP Pavilion laptop was, in one word, an adventure. There were so many issues throughout the entire process that hung up the computer and brought everything to a stop. But after four days, three installation discs, and admittedly some tears, I can now say I know Linux…-ish.