Push-Threw-Designs Extended Info Blog - In depth project information as well as website design and development talk.

This is a print project that was recently completed for the crew over at Hostile Fightwear.  This half page ad will be running sometime within the next couple of months in Grappler Magazine.  Hope you like it!

(Click to download)

If you’ve new to surfing the web and well, to the universe as a whole, Firefox is one of the best web browsers available on the internet today. In my opinion, it’s the best. One of the biggest reasons why I believe Firefox is the best internet browser is because of the open source-ness to it. This allows other developers to create and share some of the most useful and innovative browser widgets/add-ons that you could imagine. From little quirky and fun additions, to add-ons that will help you organize your tasks and increase your productivity.

With the newest version of Firefox, Firefox 3, the developers have made some 15,000 improvements to the previous version. Yeah, you heard me right, 15,000!! Cruising to your favorite websites will now be even faster than before and, most importantly, more secure. New malware script detection has been incorporated into the new browser to alert you when these malicious scripts have been detected on a website and gives you a quick out before anything detrimental to your security occurs. The blazing speed now trumps that of any version of IE (internet explorer) and amongst, basically, all others by leaps and bounds. You have to just check out all of the other features yourself.

So go get Firefox today and help them gain a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloads in one day!!

What’s with the long pic, huh?! Woah, saddle down there partner. Just keep hold of ‘dem reigns now, ya hear! This is just one of the few new projects that have been going on around these parts lately. It’s a completely custom Myspace design for a talented band out of Pennsylvania. The default Myspace profile design was completely overhauled with this one. This new profile is sporting a continuously animated Flash header and a nice logo from, who else…yours truly. Easily editable custom “Shop” and “Multimedia” sections were also added to help the band to promote themselves even more. Having complete control over the hayness coding of Myspace was detrimental in pulling off this layout. If you’re not familiar with the default profile design that Myspace gives its uers (well, for starters, who are you and what is your major malfunction?!), then check out the pic below:

Yeah….pretty….ahh…..yawn…….drab huh. If you want your Myspace profile to stand out and attract the right attention from your demographic, then getting a professional design for your profile is an extremely crucial step in your overall marketing strategy. When you think about it, what you’re trying to do is get your name out there in hopes to receive more business, sponsorships, tour bookings, better clients and so on. That’s all marketing is - getting known - just in its more basic form.

An issue also popped up on this project that has never really big a big deal before. The dreaded PC vs. MAC BATTLE ROYALE! All of my clients were MAC owners and used the Safari browser. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve dealt with making sites cross browser and system compatible with the Safari browser before, but that was using standards compliant coding. If you’ve ever worked within the hellish anti-correct-pro-insanely-craptastic-coding confines of Myspace, you know exactly what I’m speaking about. Not only does Myspace change their coding whenever they feel like (which used to be kind of frequent in my opinion), they change URLs on submission to the most wretched internet addresses ever seen by man, and it also damn near promotes the use of poorly written, “hack-like” code coupled with “tags-of-deprecation, oh my!”, in some instances. I’m sure that the goal Myspace wasn’t and still isn’t to make designing their profiles any easier, but trying to adhere to some more standard practices would be nice.

This brings up an important question though (well it’s always really there). Should you spend time on designing websites for the relatively “small” market of MAC users? Mmmm…..sounds like an upcoming posts. Thanks for taking the time to read this! Hope you enjoyed yourself, and, as always, please feel free to send over some feedback.

“I just realized why this industry sucks” is a forum post generating plenty of debate at the moment, after the poster (PMichaud) laid out his frustrations as a web developer.

The crux of his disillusionment is that web developers’ “highly trained skills have been commoditized by market ignorance.”

That is, clients don’t understand the web, so they fail to understand what they need, and don’t have the knowledge or the ability to identify what they need. The client also lacks the ability to differentiate the “right” solution or developer from a poor one.

As a result, clients often end up with a poor solution to their problem, because they go with the cheapest solution. This cheap and poor solution inevitably fails, and it’s another black mark for the entire industry.

I’ve seen this happen 100 times before. Cheap doesn’t mean good. It means cheap. These web sites simply don’t have the resources allocated to them to ensure success. The Web is not a case of “build it and they’ll come.” It’s a case of build it, promote the heck out of it, provide entertaining, ever-changing information, and they may come — and then they may stay.

So what’s the solution? As PMichaud points out, major education of the entire market would be nice. But that’s not going to happen.

Maybe a standard accreditation system for web professionals? I think that’s impossible — there are simply too many variables across too many markets.

There is no real solution. Some clients will always take the cheap option, just as some clients will always understand that allocating more resources to a project may enhance its prospects for success. And there will always be web developers who don’t provide the best solution.

It’s up to the web developer to work within the parameters of the industry — great clients, idiot prospects, slow payers, big payers, tough competitors, red tape, fast changing technology … and lots more.

These are the same challenges every business faces. We need to adapt, and make it work, or fizzle out.

This article was originally posted from the great web design industry experts at Sitepoint

Here are the few new projects that I mentioned would be posted soon in the last post or so. The first project was a Flash intro and website for a party promotions company called RocStar Promotions. These guys put together some of the craziest parties in the tri-state area and down in Florida. They also book celebrities from Mtv and more for special events and as guests at parties. At the moment this website is still awaiting more content, so be sure to check back later to view a more robust site.

The second website is for a clothing company in Toronto, Morph Clothing, that specializes in grunge clothing. Pretty cool stuff. This site is a CSS/XHTML website with some separate Flash components throughout (header, clothing in Shop sections). There is a Paypal shopping cart integrated into the website as well.

Last, but certainly not least, is another Flash photography website. This website was pretty exciting for me because I haven’t had the opportunity to work with an all Flash website in some time. I’ve been working on some new coding that I wanted to try out and this project gave me that opportunity. There are two full galleries (wedding and senior) and a separate restoration photo section that displays a before and after of one photo. There is a Flash/PHP form for the contact section that will allow the owners to get structured information from potential customers.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post and I hope that you enjoy these websites! You can click the links in the Link Exchange section or just visit my website at www.push-threw-designs.com.

Whew! Things have been pretty busy around here lately . Expect to see a few new projects on the website after the holiday season. Speaking on the holiday…Happy Holidays!! I hope you all get what you wanted to get.

I remember saying in my last post, “I’ll be writing an article on time management soon”. So here’s a short about that very subject:

WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN!!!

No matter how photographic you think your memory may be or how small the task may be, when you’re overloaded with tasks-galore, you tend to forget things; forget things very quickly. Your best bet is to just simply write everything down. The item to use is something that you are around every time you need it. For some it’s a computer, and for some it’s a notepad and pen, and for others it’s a cell phone task manager. Whatever you find out what works best for you, use it.

A few months ago I finally caved in and picked up a nice sized white board that goes right next to my desk. I stopped denying that my memory was, in fact, quite un-photographic at times. You don’t want clients emailing and calling you asking,”Uh…where’s my update?”, or anything of the sort. A prompt and time-oriented freelancer is a kept freelancer. The white board that I purchased has a full size calendar, a nice memo area, and a tack board section on it, so I can stick important letters and documents to. This way, basically everything is in my face every time I try to leave my desk. This is both helpful and discouraging at times, but it always helps to keep your mind thinking on how to best go about what you have to get done.

Things have been pretty busy around here lately with projects, past clients, and potential clients (I plan on writing an article on time management soon). My current web design project will be posted in its entirety within the next couple of weeks, but until then you can check out the Flash intro that is currently posted until the site is completed. You can view the website intro here . I’ll drop another post off soon. As usual, you can always leave me a comment to let me know what you think of my latest work. Thanks!

So here we are again. Having to utilize new code to embed our flash movies/objects better; it feels so soon. The new SwfObject is a javascript file, somewhat similar to the previous FlashObject embed, that when linked to your flash movie in your XHTML document, you can get rid of that pesky “Click to Activate Active X Control” prompt in IE7. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s when Internet Explorer version 7 (a web browser) instructs you to click a flash object on the website in order to activate that flash object and make it available for interaction. My last clients insisted that they didn’t want that prompt to be visible to users of IE7 on their website and since I had actually read about how to do this some time ago, that was no problem for me. I found a great blog that explains how to do this easy flash and full browser flash embeds over at Deconcept, a blog by Geoff Stearns. Geoff offers a free download of the .js file you need to make all of this scripting goodness possible.

Leave me a comment if you found this useful or if you have any questions. Don’t forget, you can subscribe to my RSS feed by clicking on the link at the bottom of this page. I’ll be having more things on here that you may find to be useful. Thanks!

New projects posted….sweet! Feels like forever since I’ve last put something in my portfolio.

Hostile Fightwear (www.hostilefightwear.net) is a company out of California that was built for fighters by fighters. This company currently has a great stock of shirts and some heavy duty fight shorts for purchase with tons more merchandise to come. This project was a part of the Push-Threw-Designs triple pack promotion (Website, Myspace, and E-card), but with some upgrades to their website package. The first upgrade was a Paypal shopping cart and the second was for me to model all of clothing for the high resolution photographs of their products (will be showcased in their upcoming magazine ad). This was new and exciting, so, of course, I was geeked about doing it. I used a few photo galleries and the website’s News section is imported into Flash via XML styled by some simple CSS. All of the fantastic photography was taken at Twin Shutterbug Studios, an affiliate of Push-Threw-Designs who delivers excellence on a daily basis. Everything came out great and my clients are extremely satisfied with their products.

Make sure you also check out Hostile Fightwear’s Myspace design and E-card. If you want to let me know how you like the new projects or have a question for me, please go ahead and drop me a comment by clicking on the heading to this entry and filling in the following form.

Original Post Date: 8/18/07

This entry really doesn’t have too much to do with website design or website development at all, but it’s something that I’m sure most of you are in tune with; technology. I’m really busy working on my current projects, so sorry for not updating this blog as often as I intended on. Anyway, here is one of my FAVORITE people on tv and the net, Morgan Webb. I can’t believe it’s actually taken me this long to check out her new website. It’s filled with up-to-the-day tech info of all sorts. Check out Morgan’s website, www.webbalert.com!

I’ll be posting my new projects as soon as they’re done. Thanks everyone!