I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to handle the design and implementation of Kukui Marketing’s website, which was formally launched today. Working with owner Kirsten Fujitani was a dream. She is familiar with my work and really gave me a ton of freedom on the design. Essentially, she sent over her logo and content and let me just go for it from there. Needless to say, not being limited by some of the usual client imposed constraints was both fun and challenging. The site is fairly image and media heavy, so using a lightbox provided a great solution to deliver much of that core content. If you are planning on conducting business in Hawaii, definitely consider connecting with Kukui Marketing to help you reach your audience.

After a good deal of consideration over the last year or so, I’ve finally decided to take a measurable step toward an IE6 free lifestyle. I’ve been waiting for, and trying to anticipate, the “right time” to stop designing for IE6 as part of my normal process. I think that time is finally here (for me anyway) with last week’s release of IE8. This step away from IE6 is a little complicated from a business perspective because several of my clients require support for IE6. Even though I don’t like it (and in some ways don’t understand it), I do acknowledge that the need for IE6 support is real and important to these clients as well as their customers/users and that it cannot realistically be ignored. Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a compromise, doesn’t it? I thought so too. The compromise is this: new clients will continue to be offered support for IE6, but at an additional cost. Existing clients will continue to enjoy IE6 support (as per norm) until such time as their website realizes a major redesign, at which point IE6 support will require additional cost. I feel like this is a reasonable way forward that will help smooth the transition away from IE6 and toward arguably better browsers while rewarding existing clients for their loyalty over the years and providing them with options for consideration as their websites continue to grow and evolve.

Getting my head wrapped around the idea that Digital Web Magazine will not be publishing in the way we’ve become so accustomed to has been a struggle. I keep thinking they’re just on holiday and things will get back to normal soon – wishful thinking. It’s been a regular read and resource for me for a long time and although I understand the situation, I’m sorry to see the change. Thankfully, the site will be alive, accessible and curated for the foreseeable future. Nice to know we’ll have it around to refer to and remember the good ‘ol days.

Just finished up a redesign and preliminary launch of The Drops‘ Website. This was an especially fun project because the client gave me a great deal of freedom to do pretty much whatever I wished in terms of the design, photography and user experience. They had some great ideas for interactivity so I got to integrate an installation of WordPress and write a couple of fun web applications. One is a vote for your favorite scent app and the other is a free sample request app that has a little bit of smarts built in. Both made for some fun with PHP and MySQL. This client is near and dear to my heart because they allowed me the privilege of handling their initial branding several years ago (which was also a really fun process). It’s been a joy to watch them grow and prosper over the years and I wish them continued success with their unique product line. They are a terrific group of hard working people.

After spending a full day working with Firefox 3 in conjunction with Firebug 1.2.0 Beta, I have formed some initial qualitative impressions. Overall, Firefox 3 feels like an upgrade over the previous version of the browser. It seems snappier and more responsive and in general I am getting used to the new skin fairly quickly. The new Firebug beta is definitely still a beta (more…)

In the spirit passing along some of the web design and development tools that I just couldn’t live without, I wanted to mention another plugin that works great with Firefox that is created by Chris Pederick – The Web Developer Toolbar. This is another one of those amazing little gems that has been around for quite a while and has proven to be invaluable to me for both getting work done on a daily basis and learning from time to time. The toolbar has a ton of useful features that can be life savers during the design process. There are options which allow you to, among other things, very quickly enable or disable images, css, and javascript, precisely resize the browser window, quickly validate code (HTML and CSS), and even outline various elements right in the browser window to graphically see how a document is built. (more…)

Needless to say, Firebug is not new news these days. It’s been around, widely used, and in my opinion, very excellent for quite some time now. Occasionally, I have found Firebug to be a handy tool for deconstructing and understanding Web pages that have been mysterious to me in terms of their functionality or design. Historically, Firebug has not been a primary tool in my daily workflow, but rather a little gem that I employ every now and again when I need it (kinda like decaf coffee – admit it – you know what I mean). (more…)

This may be old news to some of you, but I thought it worth a mention nonetheless. I found an excellent online reference for standards aware designers. Sitepoint has published nicely organized HTML and CSS references worthy of bookmarking. If I understand correctly, they will be bringing developers into the fold before too long with a Javascript reference as well (at the time of this writing the Javascript reference is not yet published but I believe I have the url correct). I am finding that an online reference is much less disruptive to my workflow than a trusty reference book. Its lighter too carry too! Hope this benefits somebody out there.

I interface with and manage quite a number of MySQL databases these days. Historically I’ve been doing all of the management of these databases via phpMyAdmin and SQL because, well… that’s just what I’ve been used to using. Using the web based tool can get a little cumbersome if you spend a lot of time working with several MySQL databases (although I must say that I am thankful it exists and it works great). While listening to the most recent episode of the MacCast podcast, I heard Navicat mentioned. (more…)

The folks over at Panic have done it again with their new–ish web design and development application called Coda (for Mac OSX only – sorry Windows users). Coda is really sort of like a swiss army knife in that it has a number of slick little tools built in and they all work pretty well. (more…)