Visual Adventures recently completed two new websites.. With both of these sites I used a technique to have a creative expanding background that would also allow the main content to be centered. This way the page would look great on a variety of screen size resolutions.

• The Lakota S Ranch Site (www.lakotatelluride.com) is to display rental properties in the Ouray Area.




• The RR Ranch site (www.rrranchproperties.com) is to display real estate listings for ranch properties in the Chama, New Mexico area.

We gave the FM Tech site some new design updates. Check it out at www.fmtech.ca.

Well it’s sort of free. The idea is that you’ll donate to these hard working individuals. Fight the software monopolies! Did you know that there was alternatives to some of the top software that you pay for on a donation basis. How can this be true? See for yourself:

Microsoft Word / Microsoft Office
Check out NeoOFfice (http://www.neooffice.org) if you don’t want to make microsoft any richer. Keep in mind that it’s not the exact same software, just that it is an alternative. Try it out and see if it works for you.

Adobe Dreamweaver
Now that Adobe has taken over Macromedia it sure feels like all the design software comes from the same place. Check out these alternatives:
nVu - (http://www.nvu.com/) A WYSIWIG editor like Dreamweaver - sort of. It doesn’t seem as powerful or user-friendly, but it is an alternative.
Aptana - (http://aptana.com/) Although it doesn’t have the WYSIWIG editing, I have come to favor this software over dreamweaver. It’s clean and simple, and you’ll be forced to improve your coding skills.

Adobe Photoshop
Yes, there’s even software out there that does something like Photoshop. The installation seemed more time consuming than what I had for patience available so I haven’t actually tried this. The software is called GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/)

FTP
A way to upload and download files from web-servers.
Check out fireFTP that works with the Firefox browser (http://fireftp.mozdev.org). It’s not quite as nice as CuteFTP, but you also don’t need to run extra software.

Google
No, Google does not have a free alternative. In fact, most of Google’s tools are free. They will up coming out with web based versions of some of the mentioned software. It should be interesting. Be sure to check out Google Earth if you have not already!

Visual Adventures recently completed a site re-design for the Ridgway Real Estate Company. The link is at http://www.ridgwayco.com. Visual Adventures teamed up with Craig at ImageAid to create a data base to manage properties and brokers. The site design was based on some print ads the company was running.

I working on a new site design. I’ll still be keeping the melting glacier theme, but the text boxes have been bugging me for sometime so I’m getting rid of them. I’ll also be adding some funky graphics here and there to break the monotony. Look for it in the next couple of weeks!

After much research and consultations with industry experts, here is what Visual Adventures recommends you do to answer the internet browser question.

Mozilla Firefox (www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/) – BEST – Firefox does a wonderful job of supporting W3C standards (www.w3c.org), has great tools for developers and users that are free and you can download them from their website. Firefox not only has these great tools, but has also created a community of users to provide feedback and tools to better its product (http://developer.mozilla.org/).

Safari (www.apple.com) – NEXT BEST – Safari Version 3 beta has good support for CSS 3 code which means you get a better viewing experience than browsers without that support. It has a nice clean interface with most of the features the other browsers has and does a good job of displaying web pages.

Internet Explorer 7 (www.microsoft.com) – IF YOU DIDN”T KNOW THERE WAS OTHER OPTIONS THIS MIGHT BE ACCEPTABLE. The best thing I can say about Internet Explorer 7 is that it does display pages better than Internet Explorer 6. I have to write special code for Internet Explorer 7 on occasion because it does not display the pages as well as Safari or Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 has issues with Flash content and is reportedly full of security holes (http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2007/02/05/).

Internet Explorer 6 (www.microsoft.com) – DON’T TOUCH THE BLUE E -
(http://browsehappy.com/why/) This browser does a horrible job at displaying pages, and has more security issues than IE7. Special style-sheets have to be written just to make up for how bad of a job it does. This browser is old technology and should be left to the scrap heaps. Unfortunately as of June ’07 37% of internet users are still on IE6 (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp). Don’t let yourself be one of them. We need to get this number down so that we all get on with our lives and stop writing code for this wretched beast. There is much better technology out there, use it! Do it for me! Do it for the children!

Opera (www.opera.com) - Using Opera is like voting for an independent candidate in an election. That pretty much sums it up.

Check out these two new websites. Gumdrops for Kids is a high end kids clothing store here in Ouray. The site was built utilizing Yahoo’s ecommerce system.
The Mortgage Store is a lender based in Telluride that we recently finished a web site for. The contact page features a google map embeded in the page and a bubble caption showing the location of the business.

First you need to find some good dark chocolate. I’ve been a fan of the Dove Dark chocolate since I was a kid. A lot of the other brands are waxy and have no flavor.
The trick to eating the chocolate is to go slow. In fact, it’s best if you just let it melt in your mouth. No chewing is allowed. You will not need much chocolate to succeed in satisfaction.
The next flavor to add is a nice, strongly made espresso or latte. It’s important not to have too much milk (like those latte’s made at Starbucks). You need to be able to taste the coffee.
Ahhh, yes, there it is. I think I’m ready for the afternoons load of work now. Smile!

I’ve spent the past two mornings (plus more time previously) working on an expandable layout for the Visual Adventures website. An expandable layout means that as the browser window is resized, the content will grow or shrink to fit. This initially sounds wonderful and you might be wondering “why aren’t all web sites like this?” Well, here is the answer. Even in a text only web site, the look will change dramatically in a 50% to 100% increase in size. It may likely become less readable if there is too much horizontal text or if it is squashed down becoming a skinny vertical tower of text. Then of course you add images into that layout and all hell starts breaking loose.

Instead of everyone having the same web experience with an expandable layout, just the opposite happens. Everybody has a different experience. Being able to adjust your own experience with the web was one of the “amazing things” about it. By changing your screen resolution or default text size, you can customize your web content to how you want it, in theory anyway. Very few users know how to even change their screen resolution or that it can be done. Even fewer know that you can change the default text size in your internet browser. As a result, most of the people who need these features have no idea that they even exist.

On top of the joys of different screen resolutions, there are also different web browsers that display sites differently from one another. On top of that, the different versions of various web browsers also display sites different from one another. This is getting exponential here. In case designing one web site was not enough, you now sometimes have to create several versions of a site for various browsers/versions.

What’s a web designer to do? We’d like to design so that everybody can view the web site right? Well, not really. Something’s gotta somewhere. There’s a balance between cool, usable, expandable, and the amount of time that is needed to build a site(s).

Note to prospective clients: there are ways to accomplish everything; it’s just a matter of finding the solution that works for you.

Hopefully I have found some sort of balance with the Visual Adventures site. I’m sure I’ll have new ideas for it in a few weeks. Of course it may be a few months before I get the time to try them out. In the meantime, I learned a lot about the various do’s and don’ts of creating expandable layouts.

I have two 10 pound paper weights sitting on my desk with the inscription “Dell” printed on the top. Not long ago these were the latest in laptop technology. After having most all of their parts replaced and with an expired warranty, they still don’t work. I could rant on and on about how Dell has done me wrong, but I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. I can summerize it all in a few words: Don’t buy a Dell!
Most developers and designers that I know are going to Mac these days. With the option of running windows as well, why not? Oh yes, the price. Well, I’m saving my pennies and soon I will travel over to the other side. I’m sure I’ll have some days of frustration with Mac, I know I have already with their iPods. I at least will have done something about my Dell problem.