What's Your Problem?

This past week I have been redesigning and rebuilding an old website that I made called What’s Your Problem? It is now live for you to play with.

What’s Your Problem? is an experimental and irreverent website I have made whose purpose is to provide random diagnosis to the mental-ailments of the user.

It’s my hope that people will maybe enjoy the surreal humour of the random diagnoses and decide to have a go at writing their own, which they can do by using the ‘Write Your Own Diagnosis’ form.

The website makes use of the WordPress commenting capabilities and blends them into a custom PHP / MySQL random call out. JQuery was used to add a bit of interest to the sliding diagnoses, and CSS3 was used to style them.

I decided to base the design of the website on a typical 1970s theme, beards and all. I’m not 100% sure why.

You can view the website and receive a free diagnosis by clicking here.

Speak The Web

Hello campers. I went to the Speak The Web conference in Manchester’s Noho (that’s in Northern Quarter, yeah?) this week, to hear internet luminaries wax lyrical about their prospective fields and the future of net-land.

The event included talks from Ben Childs (mobile web development chap), Dom Hodgson (SEO and all-around coding geekery), Remy Sharp (HTML 5 know-it-all) and the self-styled rockstar of CSS Andy Clarke (or ‘Clarky’ as he kept referring to himself).

It was an emotional affair, particularly with Remy Sharp’s explanation of HTML 5’s current limitations – he was showing examples of flash-less video content using only html, as well as showing how HTML5 will be able to communicate directly with MySQL without the dependence of PHP – if I’ve got that correct. Either way, it blew my tiny mind somewhat.

Even more rousing was Andy Clarke’s ‘Hardboiled’ or ‘no-compromise’ proponent of CSS3 usage, where he advocated graceful degradation of the more advanced CSS3 techniques – basically, he wants us all to build websites using all the latest CSS3 techniques available to us, and then work backwards to try and fix up horribly old and massively annoying browsers such as IE6. This was controversial in that most web designers have been under the mantra that ‘thou shalt make websites that work across all browsers and look and function the same’ – Andy Clarke simply stated that this was rubbish and if we don’t take advantage of the latest CSS3 offerings as well as the facilitations of the latest browsers, there may never be need for people stuck with IE6 to upgrade. Other than the frequent security risks that have been in the news a lot of late.

His talk drew the most criticism, but was thusly the most entertaining. There was also quite a bit of facial hair in the room. And much coding-knowledge-pugilism.

If you get chance, you should go along to another Speak The Web event as they’re focusing on the web-talent of North England, rather than doing what most of the other conferences do and just focus on London and Brighton, which makes a nice change.

View the website here: http://speaktheweb.org

Yay Everyday!

Inspiration is rather important. If there was no inspiration, browsing the internet would be as about exciting as browsing through a really, really boring internet. Which makes sense.

Luckily though, there are some valiant individuals out there who strive to destroy the aesthetic dire straits, and colour the web with a collection of the most pretty, witty and often nude things.

And although it might lack the sheer volume of images that ffffound.com has, I think my personal favourite creative inspiration blog is: Yay Everyday!.

They say:

We’re not an image bookmarking site. We don’t selfishly hoard images for ourselves. We’re more interested in sharing the inspiration, website and artist behind the work.

- Which is lovely.

I also happen to like the design and functionality of the website; which was created by Chris Kalani and Tim Neuwerth.

As featured on...

Huzzah! Since the latest version of Ghosthorses has been set free among the vast, incomprehensible plains of web-land…

It has been selected or at least got a mention on a number of CSS gallery / inspiration websites – which is more than a little lovely and flattering.

If you’d like to take your website viewing apparatus over to those various websites, I will now place a list of where Ghosthorses 4 can be found.

Ghosthorses – as featured on:

• incrediblend
• cssdeluxe.com
• css-design-yorkshire.com
• cssdownunder.com
• cssluxury.com
• cssmayo.com
• topsitetally.com
• cssworld.de
• kreativeshowcase.com
• egort.com
• csscake.com
• cssdose.com
• cssfury.com
• quandtnet.de

I’ll add more links on if I spot any more mentions.

Bernisson France

To keep you abreast of everything that I do – regarding websites at least – I’m about to start work on redesigning and rebuilding the bernisson-france.co.uk website.

The website that will keep me busy for the next month is a lovely 7 bedroom holiday home in the south of France. The owners have decided they would like to upgrade their website and design to include a fully content managed website, to allow themselves to update listing and prices easily and at any time they want.

You can visit the current website by visiting: bernisson-france.co.uk.

Thank you.

This website is ALIVE!

Ghosthorses (no.4), the website you’re looking at and my web design portfolio, is now live and available on the big internet thing.

It took a while longer than the last few to design and build because it’s quite a bit more complicated, but hopefully… it doesn’t look complicated, as, it’s supposed to be friendly looking.

I would be really, really pleased if you were to look around the website and let me know if the website looks and works correctly with whatever monitor size you use, as well as your choice of browser and your operating system.

Just something like: “Looks ok!” or “That bit doesn’t work” or, “This bit is a bit confusing.” – all of it is very useful and welcome. You can let me know these things by clicking on the ‘Comments’ button at the top or the bottom of this post.

Thanking you muchly,
Stephen

NMA's Website of the Week

The GGR Group website that I designed and built with Cuckoo Design has won New Media Age’s Website of the Week.

The website was design and created while working for Cuckoo Design (which I still do – check them out!) a design and digital agency based in Salford.

Also, Cuckoo Design are going on to design the rest of the various GGR websites although I should mention the other website designs aren’t coming from moi.

GGR is the leading provider of vacuum-lifting equipment to the UK and Irish construction industries.

You can check out the website by Clicking here.

Logo ideas

The process of re-designing the Ghosthorses website had led me to create a variety of new logos which you may view below.

The logos, which can be viewed by clicking here were an attempt to show the progression of the Ghosthorses website, in terms of design as well as technique.

You could argue some of these logos are a bit cumbersome, or just not great, and I’d probably agree… or you may like one of these more than the one I ultimately chose, but I get the final pick, so there.

A happy 2010 to you.

Should I open that 2nd bottle of wine, or would I be a total drunken drunk-face for doing so?

A hearty, 14lbs stab of prime ‘Happy New Year’ from me, served with a side of ‘Many Happy Returns’ from Ghosthorses. I’ve no idea why I decided to tie this statement into food, perhaps it’s my body’s way of letting me know I’m pregnant. As I’m male, I hope this isn’t the case.

Anyway! I’m hoping 2010 will be a glorious year for all, and although at the time of writing this website is only 50% completed, let’s hope that when it eventually set free to roam the wilds of the inter-web, it will be fit enough to survive and flourish. Amen.

Make this year a good ‘un, or I’ll get ya!
Stephen Fairbanks

Cuckoo's Augmented Xmas

Merry Christmas, y’all! As so few people say. At Cuckoo Design, while sitting at out desks, stroking our white beards and trying to hide our chocolate-filled bellies…

We decided that the best way to show our excitement for the festive season was to treat our friends to a magical 3D box of snow-spewing wonderfulness!

This magical 3D box uses Augmented Reality and Papervision3D technology to create a cube that responds to the position of a shape (in this case, an Xmas tree) that is held up to a web-cam.

If you have have a web cam, or would just like to check out what we did, please visit Cuckoo’s Magical Xmas page.

Fanks.