Griffith Designs

I had the opportunity to develop a new feature for a content search for a website I am working on today, and when it was finished a few people didn’t see the reasoning behind it. I can’t give too much away because the site isn’t live yet, but it made me pose the question of are we designing and coding websites based on other people’s ideas or our own?

Who or what defines what is a useful tool? In short, we do. The designers and developers of the Internet. We decided what a user would use and understand. We define what is on the Internet and if I can develop a unique, functional and practical way of displaying it, the question is no longer the stagnant why – it is the productive how.

if (you.think > theBox) { $.().expand(‘boundaries’); }

Well, recently I had to vertically center an image in a square DIV. This had to be done with the image being scaled to a specific width, 90px. I know there are probably hundreds of ways to do this, but this is the one that I used to determine how much top margin to set on the image in order to center it vertically.

<cfobject type="JAVA" action="Create" name="tk" class="java.awt.Toolkit"></cfobject>
<cfobject type="JAVA" action="Create" name="img" class="java.awt.Image"></cfobject>
<!--- requires knowing the desired width of the image/div --->
<cfset imgDims = 90 />
<cfscript>
 imagePath = ExpandPath ("/uploads/Image/sponsors/#sm_image#");
 img = tk.getDefaultToolkit().getImage("#imagePath#");
 imgWidth = img.getWidth();
 imgHeight = img.getHeight();
 percentage = (imgDims / imgWidth) * 100;
 newHeight = round((imgHeight * percentage) / 100);
 margin = (imgDims - newHeight) / 2;
</cfscript>

Continue reading “Determine IMG Scale Ratio” »

It seems people and companies don’t take the world of tabbed internet browsing into consideration when titling their pages. Titles should be no more than 4 to 6 words so that it displays correctly in the tab. Especially considering the relative influence it has on their SEP. Consider UX.

OK, there are a lot of benefits to naming the files you create when doing web design in a manner that makes sense. Recently I developed a site for a company and it was all static files with no database back-end. You can imagine that there were a lot of products and pages that had to be created as a result. When doing this I decided to go with the following convention:

category-subcategory-product-name-name.cfm

Continue reading “Beauty of File Naming” »