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Laughing Dog Photography Website Redesign

We just launched Dustin Delf’s new website, Laughing Dog Photography. By we I mean Dave from Yellow Pencil and myself. I did the interface and the design and Dave did all of the thinking. =)

It’s a pretty playful site and I think it represents Dustin’s personality pretty well. The site gives Dustin the ability to edit his photos from anywhere.

385 days ago by Josh Loewen {digg} {del.icio.us}

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The new Government of Alberta Website family

A few of the new Government of Alberta websites I designed are beginning to get launched. For example, the Ed Stelmach and Sustainable Resources and Development websites are now up.

The driving force behind these sites was to focus on usability, citizen needs, and the information goals of Albertans. A lot of work went into researching what and why Albertans would like out of a website and I’m pretty happy at how valuable they are.

The usability and bulk of the work came from Yellow Pencil and I hope that Albertans can now find their way around government (which is always a daunting task) a little easier.

462 days ago by Josh Loewen {digg} {del.icio.us}

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Google Plus and the guy who fixes my car

Everyone has a guy they know that is really good at one thing. I know a guy who fixes cars, a girl who does illustrations, and a guy that knows about guitars. If I need a new guitar, I ask Paul because he’s the guy that knows about guitars. I dig Google because it does one thing extremely well – it finds stuff and refines an otherwise untargeted search.

Which brings me to Google’s new thing that they’re launching, Google Plus. The whole concept of Google Plus is that it not only brings you relevant results, it gives you a bunch of info on that result. Sort of like when searching for a film that’s showing in your area, Google will give you the showtimes for that film near you and maps to the movie theatres. (If they have your location)

Google Plus will be a large part of future search results in the same way that Maps has become integrated into many searches because it only makes sense to provide as much relevant information to the user as possible – or does it?

The thing is, I already have a guy I know for movies in Edmonton, Edmovieguide They’ve been giving me all the movie info I need for the last 5 years because they’re the specialists and know what they’re talking about, so they’re the guy I’d ask. As for Google Plus, I’m not asking.

490 days ago by Josh Loewen {digg} {del.icio.us}

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Overview and Advantages of CSS Based Websites

A lot of clients ask me why I use CSS, so I hope to do a solid, short explanation of why below…

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. There are basically two ways to build a website interface – in tables or CSS.

Tables

Tables were designed to work for tabular data and work wonderfully for that purpose. Tools like Dreamweaver and Frontpage gave web designers the ability to visually draw tables without having to actually touch the code, and begin adding graphics and content to their tabular data. The vast majority of websites are built using tables.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets came up a few years ago and are now the mainstay of the current web design and development community. They are slightly more difficult to build because there are no “drawing” tools and require an expert to fully execute – but the long term benefits are well documented and easy to understand.

The reason they have caught on so quickly is because sites that use CSS are:


  • easy to maintain – meaning less $ spent on revisions

  • easy to redesign – again, less $

  • search engine friendly

  • fully endorsed by the guy who kind of invented the internet.

  • fast loading

  • great on text-only devices

Well, I hope that gives you a good overview of the advantages of CSS. For further reading, read The Business Value of CSS.

499 days ago by Josh Loewen {digg} {del.icio.us}

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