Here at Voodoochilli we like to try and keep things fresh. Web design is an exciting industry to be in right now, there’s plenty of things happening, new technologies and styles appearing all of the time. It is essential that a company such as ours keeps up to date with these things and keeps being innovative. Although we love building sites for our clients we have made the decision to adopt the 20% rule – from now on Fridays will be a day when we work on our own self-directed projects. This will enable us to keep coming up with new ideas as well as sharpening our creative tool-set.
Below is a rather interesting video which mentions another company adopting this approach. Fascinating stuff!
We are currently developing a free company website service. It has occurred to us that in the current clime, many start-up companies are simply not in the position to afford the design and build of a bespoke website. We hope to help solve this problem with CompanySite.org.
Although there are other free website services available on the net – most of them are extremely unsightly and barely function. We hope to rectify this.
The site will be funded mostly by advertising but there will also be a premium service for those that wish to have a website at an affordable price.
It’s all very hush hush at the moment, so I can’t reveal too many details except that we hope to have the system completed soon.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
We recently launched aggora.co.uk – a site for a company that are a “specialist innovator in the provision and delivery of catering equipment solutions to the foodservice industry.”
AGGORA have some really big clients under their belt including BT, Vodafone, Sainsbury’s, Goodwood Race Course, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Oxford University to name but a few.
I am really pleased with how the site has turned out, no small part of down to our designer Dave who has done some great work for us lately.
Ever noticed than Internet Explorer seems to render PNG files a slightly different colour that firefox and other browsers? It’s due to the fact that explorer doesn’t handle the gamma properly. Well there is a work around, simply use this tool and delete the gamma. Simple as! Took me a while to find out that though!
PNG image files are great. They support full transparency unlike GIFs which tend to look blocky. The only problem is IE 6 doesn’t support PNG transparency, and with about 30% of people still using IE 6 this is a real problem.
On a recent project I needed to use PNGs because of their transparencies, GIFs just wouldn’t cut it. I racked my brains trying to think of a solution, and finally I decided to Google it and see if anyone has found a solution.
They have!
On this site the developer found a way of getting full transparency using a bit of Javascript. It works great, but does take a few milliseconds to load. I guess the only real problem is if someone is using IE 6 and have Javascript disabled. I reckon this would be a tiny fraction of a percent.
One of our personal sites, Voodoochilli.net the online artists portfolio has been redesigned. We decided to use full CSS this time (as last time it was a hybrid of CSS and tables). As usual there were a few problems with Internet explorer 6, but we managed to find a work around. Anyway, if you’re an artist or designer feel free to show off you work for free.
I found a great site that has a load of “Web 2.0″ layer styles. The site also has instructions on how to install into Photoshop.
