Tag: website development

I’m finishing a website for a couple in Cheshire. It’s her business, but they’re both involved in the project. It’s been fun to design and what I plan to do when we get to SoCal.

Maybe it doesn’t seem this way from the outside, but web design is like writing or making furniture or any other creative pursuit.

Designing her site meant a logo, color scheme, fonts and a zillion other tiny details. It’s like picking an outfit to wear and making sure every piece goes together. When it works it is very satisfying.

Actually, the whole creative process is satisfying. That’s why I always enjoyed being on TV, even after three decades of doing it nightly. Being creative never gets old.

This is my expertise. The couple gave me a free hand with the understanding they have final say. That seems to be the easiest way to make everyone happy. Most people really don’t know what they want until after they see it!

I’ll unveil it in a few days.

Today was a busy day at the keys preparing to open Doppler Design.

First, I got an OK from Mark Shiffrin to go live with his site. Some of you might remember when Mark was Consumer Commissioner for Connecticut.

He is pragmatic. He wanted to check and double check and double check again. Detail’s good when you’re a lawyer. I was antsy to pull the switch.

Anyway, pulled it is.

The Doppler Design website is nearing completion. Pieces (and techniques) have begun to come together. I have been helped greatly by friends, honest in their opinions.

For the time being I’m on the kitchen table with two monitors. On my right is the site itself–the front end. That’s what you’ll see, though in the photo above I’m using some diagnostic tools on top of it.

On the left side is the back end. It’s where everything you see is controlled.

There is an exceptionally granular amount of control available when a site is designed. That poses a dilemma, because you can change and change and change and change. Too much choice is a time sink!

My speed of coding is picking up. So is my collection of go-to tools.

I’ve tried to follow the new web standard of using CSS (cascading style sheets) wherever possible, replacing the images that used to be used for shapes and backgrounds. There’s still a lot of Photoshop time.

Until recently web browsers could only show a limited number of fonts. To get around the problem developers often put text online as images. It works for humans, but Google couldn’t always read it.

To solve their problem and mine, Google now offers a free selection of 600+ fonts which diisplay in a browser and are search engine friendly! DopplerDesign takes advantage.

It turns out the web is full of little, esoteric websites that eliminate lots of manual labor. There are sites to help choose compatible colors and compatible fonts. There are sites which allow you to ‘draw’ objects then gives you the necessary code to feed your site. There’s a site that only does striped backgrounds!

On this Friday morning I’m happy with how things are going. Hopefully you’ll get to see it in the next few days.