I *think* that my new Wordpress theme is ready to be unleashed kicking and thrashing into the world. It’s called Bluebubbl and it’s a clean, two-column layout with a little jiggery-pokery in the footer to display recent comments and the like. I thought I’d make it available after using a similar design for my work on the Cranleigh Community Church website.

I think it may well constitute a work in progress, but nevertheless I’ll soon be submitting it to the Wordpress theme viewer site and OSSkins, two top class Wordpress theme repositories.

Download Blububbl, my first free Wordpress theme here and let me know your thoughts. You never know, there may be a Redbubbl one day…

This one puzzled me for ages. I tried everything - transparent GIF’s, alpha-channel PNG’s and a big chisel. Then I found RoundedCornr and have never looked back!

It’s basically a web-based css rounded corner machine that does all the hard work for you, you just feed it your desired corner radius, background colour, box colour and away you go. It outputs a block of cut-n-paste html code, some css code and four dynamically-created png image files that when mixed together create the perfect css rounded corner box.

I’ve used it on several projects, most recently over at the Cranleigh Community Church website. I challenge you NOT to find a use for it…

Coffee Republic are to be the first coffee chain to offer free wifi access in the UK. A convenient feature given the recently opened a branch here in Bournemouth. Looks like I may have to find an excuse to work remotely next week, although it’ll do no good for my double amaretto latte addiction.

Working in conjunction with Imagecleaver (a London-based video editing and new media company), I’ve worked on the production of a series of visual graphic design projects for companies such as Sony, Philips and 3.

The work is based around transforming hand drawn sketches into A3 Photoshop PSD files. It’s a welcome addition to the portfolio, and a healthy challenge, as all the internal elements have to be redrawn as shape layers so it’s not a simple of job of using the Illustrator ‘live trace’ feature - that would be cheating!

Having owned my very own Holga medium-format camera for a few months now, I’m just starting to get the hang of it. Sure, using it is not without its teething troubles and it takes a few rolls of film to discover the unique ‘personality’ of one’s Holga, but it’s definitely worth it.

You can check out the results on my Holga photostream on Flickr, or keep an eye on my photography portfolio page. Any other Holga owners or Lomographers out there in Bournemouth…?

Also, a great resource for using and customising your Holga can be found over at SquareFrog. Happy snapping =)

Even when using the most sound CSS design principles, sometimes a website can end up looking different across a range of platforms/browsers. That’s where cross-browser compatibility checking comes in. In the early days I had to have physical access to a range of machines (or phone people and ask them to check!) in order to make sure everything looked ok.

Nowadays the hard work is done for us, especially by sites like BrowserShots, an online testing utility that lets you check how your delicious new design looks across a range of hardware and software. I was amazed at the range of platforms, and although I knew of the Flock and SeaMonkey browsers, had never heard of K-Meleon. Consider me enlightened.

Web site design in Bournemouth, Dorset is a funny old business. Firstly, it’s a great place to live; there’s several blue flag beaches, more bars and nightclubs you can comfortably shake a stick at, a couple of cinemas and even a new branch of wagamama (very Londres).

A Google search for “Web site design in Bournemouth” returns more than a million hits, and the first page (surely the goal of any self-respecting company?) displays a pretty good cross-section of web design companies in the area. However, a number of the industry “heavy hitters” are woefully absent, which is strange given that this keyword phrase is number 5 on the “Bournemouth” list generated by Overture’s keyword selector tool (with “Bournemouth email marketing” coming in at 7th place).

Why is this? Why are some of the biggest names in Bournemouth web design not appearing on the first page of a Google search? Well, I think enough has been said about how to gain search engine ranking positions, but what I will say is that a quick scan of the leading local web and graphic design companies shows a lack of appropriate keyword tags, and some fairly generic title and description tags.

The point of all this? Well if the most important thing about buying property is “location, location, location” then the web-equivalent is “title tag, title tag, title tag”. Prioritise this above all else - make it snappy and relevant, picking up keywords from your body copy as you go. Then think about the body copy itself, with the keyword and description tags bringing up the rear. If you’re using Wordpress, try the All in One SEO Pack which takes care of much of this.

The new website for Bournemouth, Poole and Dorset East Secondary School-Centered Teacher Training is now live. The old site was a basic flat html site, with little interest to bring potential new teachers into the training course. It was decided that a complete overhaul was required, and so I began by discussing the client’s needs, starting by reviewing their target audience and moving onto general aspects of overall design.

The new site now allows the client to manage every aspect of their online presence, from user registration to latest news and even a vacancy listing. The site is built on a flexible, modular platform, meaning that more functionality can be added in the future, without the need for re-writing any of the existing code.

While working on a project for a multi-national company who are pretty strict on their web accessibility compliance, I stumbled across a problem regarding nested lists. For as long as I can recall, it’s been fine to nest a <ul> tag within a <ul> tag to produce sub navigation or secondary intented lists thus:

<ul>
<li>list item one</li>
<li>list item two</li>
<ul>
<li>sub item one</li>
<li>sub item two</li>
</ul>
<li>list item three</li>
</ul>

However, try as I might I couldn’t get the thing to validate under XHTML 1.0. In the end I had to abandon the second level <ul> and use a css class to do the same thing. The result looks more like this:

<ul>
<li>list item one</li>
<li>list item two</li>
<li class="sub">sub item one</li>
<li class="sub">sub item two</li>
<li>list item three</li>
</ul>

No worries mate!

Mike Rundle at Think Vitamin has written a great article surrounding an interesting acronym to help clear the muddy waters of website design. C.R.A.P. stands for Contrast, Repitition, Alignment and Proximity and it’s a must-read for anyone contemplating serious design work. Check it out at www.thinkvitamin.com