The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

It is often said that content is king, still, conscious people around insist that layout and design for you blog/site is essential.

In fact, I think this is no contradiction at all, no monarch can keep the throne without proper garment.

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Since I first met Gmail, in the very beginning of the service, I became addicted to the interface and, this days, I can hardly imagine myself using something else.

Yet using public email addresses is a big problem because if one day you change to another service you will have the headache of telling everybody about your new address. Having your own domain and your email within it is much better.

You may also want to handle old email accounts within Gmail transparently.

In this article, I will show you how to configure Gmail to manage multiple accounts in a transparent way and using your own domain email address or any other you may like.

Update: See the sequel of this article and learn How to manage all your main in Gmail: Filters, Labels multiple Id’s and even backups

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I think most good web developers know how a bad browser Internet Explorer is.

Web development has an inherent difficulty because code you write is only an outline of what you want done, an intention. Is really up to the browser what is actually going to happen.

Some browsers don’t support some features and web developers should treat this with graceful degradation. Explorer is no exception.

One of the beauties of the web is that the user is in control. Browser choice and options are there to ensure that and sites should support that.

As a web publisher one want primarily to deliver information to public, not layout. The layout is support, meant to enhance the usability of the page. Not only for eye pleasure and reinforce brand indentity.
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I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with informative blogs. Those that doesn’t have original content and just collect things around the web. In fact, I do read regularly a couple of them.

But I do think that a blogger who doesn’t put thoughts and feelings on his blog is missing a huge chance to learn.

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When I switched from Blogger to Wordpress I had to deal with the problem of how to deal with the old pages.

Blogger style of archiving was static. That means that for every post you created, the Blogger system created a static HTML page.

Wordpress on the other side creates pages dynamically, meaning that there is no .html file whatsoever, the page is created on the fly whenever you request it. A change in the database automatically reflects on the page.

Now, the problem is, the address of the new pages doesn’t match the address of the old ones.

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A fluid layout for a web page is one that adapts itself to the window size, an elastic layout is one that adapts itself to text size. When nothing of this happens, the layout is said to be fixed.

A layout that Fluid and Elastic is a step towards a future with high screen resolutions

One of my great ambitions for the Z’oC Layout was to have a layout that was both fluid and elastic layout, and this is just what I have done. I completely redesigned the layout to be fluid, elastic and more reader friendly.

A layout that is both fluid and elastic means that you are able to take advantage of all screen, whatever format and resolution your public may have and, additionally, means that you can increase the text size a lot without breaking the layout.
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In my opinion, one of the coolest things of the site I’ve built to Paulo gazela is the event agenda on the navigation bar.

Of course there are many calendar programs around to add to your site and it’s also possible to integrate google calendar or a similar tool, but all Paulo needed was a way to show the events he was going to be in for the folowing, say, 15 days, and an easy interface to add them.

The solution is very simple. We’ve built a database with the date, time and details of the events and we created a SQL query to get all the events 15 days from the current date.

A single SQL query like the one below can handle everything

SELECT *
FROM event, place
WHERE event.place=place.id
  AND CURDATE() < = event.thedate
  AND DATE_ADD(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 15 DAY) >= event.thedate
ORDER BY
  event.thedate ASC,
  event.thetime ASC;

If you want to understand better what this is, to build the database tables and get some more detail, read on.

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In december I’ve wrote an article talking a little bit about color theory and featuring Kuler, a very nice and useful tool from Adobe to explore the color theory.

Now, reading the Usabilità blog I came across with a nice tool that is much simpler, but has the power to bring insight when choosing colors for web pages. Also has the advantage that no much color theory is needed to use it. Very useful tool.

If this appeals to you, check Yafla.

A few weeks ago I came up with the idea of having a web page with images composed of multiple layers and the layers could move differently when the object is resized.

And here it is.

Of course we all see web 2.0 pages with a lot of resizable and draggable menus, images and all imaginable things, but I decided to do it very clean and very easy to understand, after all is just a proof of concept.
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On february 22, 2006 the Zo’C blog started as a gourmet blog about food and lifestyle, but the need for a broader subject made design , photography, web development, book reviews and a couple of more things to show up.

Initially it was a project together with my wife, but I ended up giving her the annazuhlke.com domain and she started her own blog that now resides at www.annazuhlke.com/whiterabbit. By the way, that is where the Zo’C name comes from, it stands fror Zühlke-O’Connor, the common part of our surnames.

As a birthday present to myself and the Zo’C blog. I have upgraded it from the basic blogger blog to a fully hosted WordPress blog in dreamhost.

It took me over a day to take the old and nice Zo’C layout and implementing it to suit the base of the wonderful Sirius theme. Also I had to tweak a lot of the internal PHP to make it look just like the old one.

Well, not quite…

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