Voodoochilli Design

This year Voodoochilli turns ten years old which is a long time for such a new industry. Ten years ago I vividly remember working on a September morning on a personal project. I stopped putting together the table infested HTML document with Adobe GoLive to run and see what the commotion was next door. My then student girlfriend Becky was watching the devastating news of planes hitting the Twin Towers. It was a scary time.

Ten years later and almost everything has changed. George Bush Junior has been replaced by the first black president of America. Becky is now my wife and thankfully I no longer design websites with tables or use GoLive.

Technically a lot of other things have changed for the web design industry in this time. Internet Explorer 6 is officially dead and I doubt many people will mourn the loss. (Sadly though, although IE 6 has gone, IE 7 and 8 are terrible browsers that cause web developers problems worldwide.) You can do things today with websites that simply were not possible back then and our whole understanding of web technology has changed considerably.

The web is more than just technology, and it changed people on a vast social scale. So much so that Web 2.0 feels like an outdated phrase. With the web becoming such a big part of society, everybody is now connected. People that have always been Luddites now have their own Facebook and twitter pages as well as internet enabled Wii consoles, Blackberries and iPhones. It is a strange time indeed! As well as the many benefits this brings, it does also create what I consider to be a major failing of the industry. There simply are no real standards, and this is exacerbated by the fact that many people think that web design is only about technology. That to build a website all you need is a copy of Dreamweaver or to be the kind of person who builds computers. This, I feel, has reduced the overall quality of websites, with many people hiring computer enthusiasts rather than designers to build their sites. There are still people building websites with Microsoft Word and no understanding of HTML and CSS let alone a strong background in art and design, an understanding of layout, composition, colour theory and typography. Web design is art and science, and one without the other reaps very poor results.

I am hopeful that my minor gripes with the web design movement are transient. So much has changed in so little time, something that no doubt will continue.

We were very pleased to have been picked from the short-list of web design and development agencies pitching for a very exciting new project. The Roma Routes website will charter the migration of the Romany people across Europe.  Working in collaboration with The Rural Media Company, the project is being funded by the European Union and is due to be launched later in the year. Watch this space!

We have just launched a new site for our clients, www.familidrugsupport.com. The redesign holds a special importance to our company as it was in fact the first commercial website built by founder of Voodoochilli, Harry O’Connor way back in 2003. For years he has wanted to redesign the site encompassing a more up to date approach to web design, both visually and technically and we are all very pleased with the results.

The site was actually built with the aid of our 50% charity discount, halving the project cost. Contrary to the beliefs of many in the web design industry, charities have very limited funds and offering a discount can sometimes be the difference between a charity having a professional designed website or not.

The new site features a brand new design, replacing the now very dated one that was online since 2003. People can now make donations via PayPal, connect using various social sites such as Facebook and more. However, the biggest single upgrade has been the addition of a custom built Content Management System allowing staff at FDS to update the content themselves, keeping it fresh while at the same time reducing long term costs.

We are pleased with the results and hope people continue to find the site a useful resource.

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.

Here is the link.