StudioTalk: Wellington Web Design and Branding Blog

Don’t you hate it when you post a link or video on Facebook and it decides to show your old pictures or thinks that your newly-launched website is all about “Under Construction, coming soon!”? Well we do, and as a web-development agency, it is important to understand and resolve the quirks and tricks of working with social media networks.

There is a nifty tool known as the ‘Facebook De-linter‘, which does make sense. Effectively it shows you what your website looks like, in Facebook’s eyes. But most importantly it also updates the Facebook cache to reflect your newest page content. So if you’re having trouble getting Facebook to recognise your new web content, throw your website into the De-linter!

Visit the Facebook De-linter.

www.newzealand.com

New styles of presenting websites are taking shape, especially with the introduction of new technologies of CSS3 and HTML5. One-page websites have their limitations, but this particular website has one of the best site introductions I have seen in a long time.

The new (launched mid-2011) 100% New Zealand Tourism website, give it a peep here: www.newzealand.com

Facebook is always making changes to keep us excited and attentive to our profiles and pages. Often these changes are minimal tweaks to layouts and new applications, but there’s a big change that I think will change the way we look at the social media environment.

Since the dawn of the ‘Blog Era’, we have been able to delve into archives of posts, events, photos and videos to relive moments from the past in a moderately logical manner. But the concept of a visual timeline representing an archive of information has been left to museum displays.

Facebook Timeline

Facebook has recently announced Timeline. Timeline is going to work much how it sounds; by organising your posts, photos and videos into a visual timeline. In addition you have more control over how your timeline looks with a giant banner at the top.

To many this will be just a nifty new Facebook feature whose novelty will wear off in three post’s time, but how will it be useful to businesses and all those fanpages? Well that will be the real test of it’s success and I can’t wait to try it.

Keep an ear to the ground and StudioTalk for more news on the topic, or click here to find out more about building traffic to your website with social media.

At long last, Adobe has realised the future of web-based animation! Flash is an amazing utility to achieve some mind-blowing effects and online experiences, no doubt about that. But with the debacle surrounding Apple’s iPad and iPhones lack of flash support, many questions have been raised about the future of Flash.

jQuery has been around quite some time, but with the recent uptake of HTML5 and CSS3, we can now achieve Flash-quality experiences without the dependence upon a third-party plugin. So iPad, iPhone, Android or PC – it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on, you will enjoy a web experience to rival even some of the flashiest Flash websites. This is of course if you’re sporting a CSS3/HTML5-compatible browser (Chrome, Firefox 5+, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 9).

It seems that Adobe has decided to embrace the growing popularity in such technology and has released a preview of it’s Adobe Edge application. Adobe Edge allows web designers to create slick animations and effects without knowing the code and all the guts behind the scene.

Adobe Edge uses a very AfterEffects-ey interface with the standard timeline, working space and intuitive tools. Have a play around with it with a free download of Adobe Edge Preview.

We support Joomla 1.7

Joomla! CMS has recently released an update to it’s heavy-weight CMS, and there is much debate as to which platform is the safest to develop with.

For the last few years Joomla 1.5 has been a solid option, with loads of third-party plugins, components and modules to get Joomla to work beyond it’s standard capabilities. And then in 2010 the developers of Joomla released version 1.6. This was a large-scale upgrade and much of the core functions and code was revamped. The result is a slick, well-refined CMS with power to boot.

The developers behind this popular CMS have implemented a 6-month release cycle, so every six months we will be hit with a new upgrade. While this sounds daunting, it is in the best interests of constantly changing technologies and website security. That is, of course, if our third-party developers can keep up.

Joomla! 1.7 has been released for several months now, and Joomla 1.6 reaches it’s theoretical ‘end of life’ this month, so it pays to consider an upgrade. More importantly though, we should all look to upgrade our Joomla 1.5 systems to at least 1.6 as it introduces much-needed core upgrades and a future-compatible system.

We have recently started a large-scale project in Joomla 1.7 and have been very impressed with the changes made. From multi-tiered categories and module activation within articles to interface design and a more considered menu structure, 1.7 is the way of the future.

With this new project, we also needed to develop for mobile platforms such as the iPad and iPhone, as well as the multitude of Android devices. With Joomla 1.5 all layouts were in a table structure which severely limited mobile layouts and general future compatibility. Introduced in 1.6, Joomla now uses HTML layouts allowing us to develop templates and websites with whatever structure we wish – heck, we can even develop an entire website in HTML5!

So if you’re looking at Joomla, 1.7 is a stable and confident release with a growing support from 3rd-party developers to extend your website. If you’re interested in upgrading to Joomla, then get in touch! You can also find out more about Joomla by visiting their website http://www.joomla.org/17.