Helvetica

I watched the movie "Helvetica" tonight. Yes it is about a font. And, as you might guess, it is kinda a slow movie. Nonetheless, some things were interesting. In particular I liked the short and interspersed review of part of the history of graphic design. Despite its focus on "Helvetica" and type face in general, it had many ideas and implications for design in general. I recommend it as a rainy day movie for any interested graphic design.

Trends & Ideas

After a Google search I came across this great site that lists some of the web design trends that they noticed in 2008. It is a great site to get ideas and/or insiparation for any kind of design. There are some neat things going on and some uber creative people out there. Check it out: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/2008-design-trends/

Accepting Donations Online

Many online non-profits want to accept donations online. And for good reason, it is just easier for a lot of people to give that way. I know my wife and I prefer to give this way. We don't have to carry cash and we can donate whenever we want, easily and securely. The problem is, that most non-profits don't have the expertise or the money to pay for a custom solution.

In comes BlueFire. I have partnered with Halo Merchant Services to provide non-profits and faith based organizations an easy and low-cost way to accept donations online. Everything is taken care of for you. No need to worry about SSL certificates, advanced web scripting, or anything else on the technical side. All you do is copy and past a piece of code on to your website and viola, all done.

Payments & Donations

I often work with groups that would like to accept donations online. There are always the easy alternatives available, like PayPal and Google Checkout. But, I recently had the chance to integrate a payment gateway into a custom cart. I had great success and was impressed with the business I worked with so I am giving them a shout-out here. If you are a non-profit (like a church or charity) and need to process credit cards or e-checks online, check out Halo Merchant Services.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are always a little fun. You get to see just how many pages your site has and which ones are more important to you. But, they are really important for search engines. It helps the automated search spiders find all the pages you have and then they can gain a helpful perspective based on the last update and your priority ranking.

This is the website to check out if you want to learn more about Sitemaps: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

I usually do my sitemaps in PHP. So, I am going to break new ground here and drop some code on my blog. Since most of my sites are now PHP, here is what I typically use:

<?PHP header("Content-Type: text/xml; charset= UTF-8"); ?>
<?PHP echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n"; ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
 <url>
  <loc>http://www.mydomain.com/</loc>
  <lastmod><?PHP 
     echo date ("Y-m-d", filemtime("index.php")); 
     ?></lastmod>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.5</priority>
 </url>
 <url>
  same stuff here...
 </ulr>
 
 ... and add more urls as needed
 
</urlset>

Make sure you test the URL in your browser first, but then it should be good to go. You can let the search engines know about it in the webmaster tools or even add a reference to it in your robots.txt file ("Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.php").

CSS: background-position

Today I discovered a new trick I can use for background images in CSS. It is based on the background-position property. This allows the designer to offset a background image used in an object (like a span or div).

I was looking at the images that Google uses in Gmail and noticed that some of their icons come all together in one larger PNG file. They form an array of icons. After some searching the web I landed on this article that explained how to select a single image from an image array: http://www.guistuff.com/css/css_imagetech1.html

Pretty neat. It reduces page load-time (because you load one image instead of multiple ones, and each file comes with overhead transaction data) and removes the need to pre-cache images for DHTML. A little bit of JavaScript and CSS and you're all set. It is going to be a handy thing to have in my design toolbox.

PDF Creator

Whenever posting documents to the internet (or emailing them) it is always best to use PDFs. Using a PDF ensures that the document will look exactly like you intended it. If you use Word or Excel or something similar, there is always the chance that someone else wont have the same version or same fonts and that the end result will look very different. And, not everyone has the same software programs--Microsoft Office is expensive. But, Adobe Acrobat Reader is free! Also, it is generally more professional to send documents in PDF, such as invoices or proposals.

So, how do you create these PDFs without dishing out all the cash for Adobe Acrobat, the not-so-free version? I have been using the free PDF creator PrimoPDF for some time now. I really like it and it has not given me any problems. It creates great looking PDFs very quickly. It installs a new printer on your computer so that you can create a PDF from any program. But instead of something being printed physically it creates a PDF file that you can save.

Works great and it is free. Two things I value, as is apparent by previous blog posts. :)