Lab Notes

Paula is the best…: The designer needs to be ever present because, inevitably, at some side meeting, something will be suggested that will totally destroy the form of the logo…
WordPress sub-pages disappeared: We just got a call from one of our clients who couldn’t get to any of the sub-pages on her site, but her home page was still up. Luckily we have run into this in the past, it’s something that happens whenever we migrate a WordPress site so we knew how to fix it.
The smart way to disable your sidebar: If you find yourself making a new WordPress template for pages that are identical to others on your site but just don’t have a sidebar, consider this technique instead which lets you turn the sidebar off selectively on a page by page basis.
The mother of all WordPress body tags: It took us a long time to perfect this gorgeous body tag, it includes everything you’d want as a front end developer.
Typepad to WordPress Migration: This is a collection of instructions we have found on different websites and hopefully will make your migration a little easier than ours was.
WordPress.com to Self-hosted Migration: There are a lot of instructions on line regarding blog migration from Wordpress.com to your own self-hosted wordpress site. These instructions are based on our experience trying to follow those instructions and have a few important steps that we figured out on our own.
Server & Domain Name Transfer Guide: mx records, nameservers, imap mailboxes… Is your head spinning? Server transfers are THE most frustrating thing a web designer deals with. I say this because when things go wrong with a transfer, it gets ugly, either your client’s email goes down or their website does, or both… so there’s a lot riding on YOU doing everything right…
API References: API, or Application Programming Interface, is the interface that a program uses to allow other applications to interact with it.
Insert Google Analytics code: GAAdd was a javascript function that automatically added the original google analytics code to your pages using DOM methods. Unfortunately the new google analytics code doesn’t seem to work with it. Below is another method which uses PHP and our attempt at making the new code work. What happened to GAAdd When Google came out […]
website solutions: Every web developer has their favorite solution for a common website task, here’s some of our favorites.
Show Latest Blog Posts on any PHP page: If you’ve ever used magpie to display your latest blog pages on a regular PHP page then you probably noticed at some point that your curly quotes don’t show up properly, this is the code you can use to do it right.
Getting Started with jQuery: Below is a quick tutorial to show you how to show and hide elements on your page. If you have a good understanding of how to target elements in an HTML page using CSS, you’ll be amazed at how easy jQuery is to use.
Browser Specific Stylesheets: It’s unfortunate, but all browsers don’t use the same rendering engines to show web pages. This means that the same combination of HTML and CSS can look different on different browsers. Figuring out how to make your site look the same on all browsers is a big part of web design.
Speed up your site: Learn about how to make your website faster.
MySQL links: For a beginning web designer MySQL can seem a bit daunting, but a little learning goes a long way, when you get into making sites with Wordpress or another CMS for instance, it pays to know how to get into phpMyAdmin (or sequelpro) and run sql queries on your database incase you need to search and replace text (just one example)
XML links: XML is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. XML’s design goals emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability over the Internet.
SEO links: The most innovative well designed site is worthless if nobody sees it, here’s some search engine optimiaztion tools to help you get more visitors.
PHP links: PHP is a scripting language for web pages that has become very popular because it is open source and is widely supported on shared servers. With NO programming experience, someone with HTML skills can start writing some simple PHP to supe up their sites with the help of the links below.
Photoshop links: Photoshop is a part of every web designers arsenal, even if you decide to do most of your design work in Illustrator or Flash, you’d still use photoshop to cut up images and save them for the web. Also there are a lot of effects you can add to vector art work, not to mention good old fashioned image retouching…
Mobile links: With iPhones and other smart phones replacing most people’s traditional cel phones, web designers can start to really deliver solid HTML content to mobile devices, here’s a few articles to get you started