Archive for April, 2010

Mayday Network site launch

Monday, April 19th, 2010

screenshot of The Mayday Network website

www.maydaynetwork.com

This week, after a month of hard work, late nights and gnashing of teeth, The Mayday Network website finally went live. A social network aimed at businesses who want to reduce their carbon footprint and do other good environmentally things, the site is entirely built and updated in Drupal. The website was designed by Anywhichway and I was responsible for initial front end template build and subsequent Drupal theming.

The site, currently in phase 1, has member profiles, news feeds and events listings with member sign up functionality. It’s main draw at this stage is ‘The Journey’ a tool that helps guide members, step by step, through their own ‘low carbon journey’. Members are able to tick off steps as they go and periodically upload stories of their progress for other users to see.

A great deal was acheived in a short time here so well done to everyone involved and thanks for putting in the hours :) .

Viral revolution or webvomit?

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

screenshot of Yvette's bridal something or other website

Recently I’ve been coming across sites that utilise such hideous design and nightmarish HTML that i’ve felt compelled to bring them to the attention of a wider audience and, in many cases, that’s exactly what i’ve done.

Recently as I prepared to Tweet this gem – it occured to me that perhaps lurking behind this terrifyingly poorly executed facade is in fact an ingenious and fresh viral marketing idea. After all it only takes one smug, superior media type (i.e. me) to stumble across it and publish the link on some social network somewhere and bingo – instant traffic.

Of course there’s a danger, as in this instance, that you take the concept too far and all your content is hidden behind an impossible to navigate front end awash with random, blindingly garish links. Handled in the right way, however, this could be rather effective. Imagine a website which on first glance is pure HTML abortion, hideous enough to get an instant mention on media boards across the web, and yet on closer inspection incorporates a surprisingly intuitive navigation which in turn leads to well designed and structured content. Food for thought my friends, perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new viral phenomenon – one that will eventually result in a mass turnaround in the way we design and build websites. Retro web design – God forbid!

Anyway, sorry for the almost actual blog like nature of this post. Back to standard postings next time. In the meantime here’s another one for you to point and laugh at. Look at his ponytail – LOL!

Javascript forms – textarea word count

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Happy Easter loyal readers (or possibly reader). Here’s a nice simple piece of JavaScript that counts down the number of words remaining in a restricted text field as you type. When you hit your limit and the counter hits zero you will no longer be able to type any words untill you delete some. There is no restriction here on characters and words are defined by spaces only. The example below shows it in action.

Textfield is limited to 50 words.

words remaining: 50

File’s attached as usual here – so download them, use them and together we can make HTML forms fun! (as long as you don’t have JavaScript disabled…)