DCN blog

Plan your projects

dcndesigns — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:37:11 +0000

What so many people forget to do or don’t value when thinking about a new website project is good planning. I just found this nice article on Smashing Magazine. Information moves so fast these days, people need to be confident in planning and taking time to organise things at the beginning of a project. So many projects are organised and altered at the design stage, which as we know is very frustrating for Designers.

HTML 5 is coming

dcndesigns — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:13:06 +0000

I can’t wait to get started with HTML 5. Hopefully the next generation of browsers will be fully HTML5 & CSS3 compliant. In the meantime our old friend (enemy) Internet Explorer will support HTML 5 with a nice simple HTML5 enabling script…

It’s that simple. Sounds strange saying that something involving IE and simple can work together in the same sentence!!!

update: The New IE9: More HTML5, CSS3 and No Windows XP: http://bit.ly/9C8hR5

An Interesting Prediction for 2010

dcndesigns — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:25:26 +0000

Taken from Read Write Web

On the bright side, 2010 will signal the death of the login. Third-party authentications will become the norm, and user data will be entrusted to a discrete handful of online properties. Users will pitch a hissyfit if ever they’re asked to create a username and password and upload an avatar. After all, doesn’t the Internet know they have a Facebook?

- Jolie O’Dell, Writer & Community Manager

So true!!!

Logo Juxtaposition – Pepsi

dcndesigns — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:01:13 +0000

I like the new Pepsi logo, but now i’ve seen this I can’t help smiling at it too!

Image Replacement with CSS

dcndesigns — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:32:39 +0000

I’ve recently been working on a new project and trying to better my CSS. I stumbled on an excellent article about Image replacement techniques in CSS. Basically a way to improve the degradability of your page, ie if some view your page in a text-only browser or is using a screen-reader application they will still have a good impression of the page content without using any images. Also the SEO benefits to your page are increased.

I found this article on the excellent CSS Tricks site. There are 9 Techniques listed there. I decided to use a couple of them within my page.

Technique #3 – one of the easiest and simplest to implement, here is the essential HTML and CSS.

`My Heading`

h1.technique-three { width: 350px; height: 75px; background: url("images/header-image.jpg"); text-indent: -9999px; }

The other method I have used is Techniue #9 – A slightly less elegant approach but still quite useful. However as the author mentions, there may be a SEO penalty for using this method, it’s hard to tell though.

`My Heading`

h1.technique-nine { width: 350px; height: 75px; background: url("images/header-image.jpg") no-repeat; font-size: 1px; color: white;}

Note, this method assumes your background image has a plain/flat colour on which to put your 1px text.

Bem-vindo Apple Store online!

dcndesigns — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:13:25 +0000

It almost passed me by without noticing: I have noticed Apple have now opened their own official Apple Store online for Brazil… finally! I wonder how this will affect the Brazilian reseller market, hopefully the over inflated prices will start to come down a bit now.

Update: I’ve just done a quick price comparison on a new MacBook

UK price: £799
Brazilian price R$2,999

£1 = R$3 approximately these days.

So it’s still around 25% more expensive to buy the same product in Brazil. Mind you that’s a lot better than paying around twice the price as it previously was!!!

Apple iPhone development to-do list: make to-do list app!

dcndesigns — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:14:09 +0000

I have been searching around for a simple to-do list app on the app store recently. I just want the ability to be able to syncronise and update my iCal/Mail to-do lists on my iPhone. I can’t believe there is no in-built app or functionality for this as standard on the iphone. So I started looking at some of the alternative apps. Here is a list of some of the apps and services that come close to achieving what I want:

Remember the Milk
Todo (Appigo)
Toodledo
Zenbe Lists

They are all pretty good solutions so I’d recommend them to anyone looking for a simple list management solution. Unfortunately though none of them integrate directly with Apple’s iCal/Mail. Come on Apple, pull your fingers out – Make a “to-do app” number one on your next iPhone development to-do list!

Manipulating Magento

dcndesigns — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:06:32 +0000

I have recently been grappling with image display functions in Magento Commerce, which is a great e-commerce tool, if a little bulky. I think if you are willing to spend hours on developing an e-commerce project then this is a great solution, it has a great store-owner admin system and is fairly flexible. I’ve enjoyed working on this project but it has given me plenty of headaches too. I will post urls when the site goes live.