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.

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.

I was recently building a jQuery-based slider for our upcoming website re-launch and needed to identify a series of elements numerically. Naturally I decided a number that auto-incremented would be ideal, so I build a testing stage to do just that.

After about 2 hours of testing and debugging to try find out why it wasn’t working, I changed the numerical ids to “block-one”, “block-two”, etc. This solved everything! It turns out that CSS does not allow elements’ ids to begin with a number. But classes are.

Who knew? Now you do. HTML ids cannot start with a number.

I came across this site recently (http://foodzie.com/) and think it’s a great example of well thought out navigation. If you have worked within the food industry you’ll appreciate the challenge of organising these categories in a way that people can easily find what they are looking for.  The design hasn’t been compromised either – you can have both!  Let us know if you come across any other good examples – we’re always keen to get inspired.