News
Archive for June, 2009
It would be easy to make an argument that development of a mobile website is a frivolous endeavor, considering the advancement in mobile browser capabilities. However, the reality is that even with the ability of some smart phones to view web pages intended for desktop browsing, it is still a necessity to have a mobile-friendly aspect to your website.
Phone-based browsing is becoming too much of a presence to ignore. On-the-go connectivity isn’t just knocking on the door of technology, it’s letting itself in.
Typography on the web has been a thorn in the sides of website designers since the very beginning. Currently, a user has to have fonts installed on their system to display them in browsers, which means true web type is generally limited to a few basic fonts (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, etc). A few basic fonts just doesn’t cut it when designing attractive websites, so designers and developers have created a few workarounds.
The most basic is to simply save type like headlines as an image. This ensures it will render properly on any browser, regardless of what fonts users have installed. The problem is that it’s not really type; users can’t highlight it (for copying and pasting), and search engines won’t index it as such. It’s also a bigger file size, although this is less of an issue now that more users are on high-speed connections. In general this is the most common solution, but fundamentally flawed. For various reasons, text on the web should be actual text.
At the Mackinac Policy Conference on Friday, Edsel B. Ford II spoke about bringing unity and a collaborative spirit back to Detroit and the State of Michigan as he presented the 2009 One D Scorecard.
The One D Scorecard, www.onedscorecard.org, is part of a regional, civic initiative that launched in November 2006 to support regional progress in Southeast Michigan.
The scorecard analyzes more than 75 indicators for five priority areas: Economic Prosperity, Educational Preparedness, Race Relations, Regional Transit, and Quality of Life. Based on the five areas, the scorecard sets a baseline to track progress and compares Michigan and the Detroit metropolitan area against other metropolitan areas and states.
A war is raging with new lines, territories and allegiances being created every day. It is the Browser War, the fight for “usage share,” or what particular browser people are using the most. The browser war traces its roots back to the start of the Internet with Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – once the overwhelming choice, finds itself under attack from all sides.
Internet historians consider the battle today the second ‘browser war.’ The first is generally accepted to be the rivalry that exploded in the mid to late 1990s between Netscape and Microsoft. Microsoft’s development of Internet Explorer (IE) versions one through five (and its subsequent addition to all Windows platforms upon installation) nearly eliminated the competition. By 2002, IE had 95% of the user share. The war had ended.
(TROY, Mich.)— Creative, unique and memorable are all words that can be used to describe the art of Salvador Dali. With those concepts in mind, Media Genesis has unveiled a new website dealing with one art gallery’s collection of the famed artist’s works.
Park West, a Southfield, Mich. based art gallery with collections including Picasso and Rembrandt, chose Media Genesis to build a new site to showcase their collection of Salvador Dali originals and display them to the public for informative and commercial reasons. (http://dali.parkwestgallery.com/index.htm)
Park West has three separate collections of Dali’s works: the Biblia Sacra, The Divine Comedy and Albaretto Editions. Each collection was created at different parts of the famed surrealist’s career, and is housed at and purchasable from Park West.
Design, content and functionality are to many, the major components of building and launching a website. But then you notice links aren’t working properly, the contact form isn’t sending to your email address and the main video on the homepage won’t play. Then you figured out the one critical step you missed – testing.
Manual testing of a site can be both daunting and time consuming, but in order for a site to be successful, some kind of testing needs to be done.
What if there was a kind of testing that could automatically check whether your website is functioning properly?
