Sarasota Web Design, 3d Animation, Video, Audio

The current and future status of Flash doesn’t look good for Adobe.

The Adobe Flash Internet media display technology has been, until the last year or so, a staple in website media. Flash had a 98% adoption rate among Internet connected computers. Flash often came pre-installed on consumer computer systems and was used religously by Internet developers. Often times an entire website was compiled within a single Flash file, with the 2% of non-flash users considered an acceptable loss. Flash was the king of the Internet and everyone believed that it would be here forever. Noone imagined that Flash would ever become obsolete. However, the iOS and HTML5 appear to have dictated the demise of Adobe Flash. Flash is becoming as relevant as dialup Internet, AOL, and the cassette tape.

As a website developer who exclusively develops modern, standards compatible web designs, Flash is on my ‘no list’. Numerous Internet sources are increasingly claiming that Internet access is graduating to mobile devices. Morgan Stanley research estimates disclosed in June 2011 that mobile device Internet access is nearly equal to that of notebook Internet access, and by 2012, mobile device Internet access will exceed that of notebook Internet access. Currently mobile Internet access is more than twice that of desktop Internet access. These facts are underscored by the ComScore report published in June 2011 that iPads and iPhones are now the dominant mobile web devices. This is to the dismay of Adobe Flash, as neither iPad nor iPhone support Flash. Therefore, anyone trying to view Adobe Flash on an iOS device will see only blank space.

Because of these trends, I often find myself recommending to potential clients that they replace the Flash animation on their website homepages with static images or HTML5 animated images. I I explain to my clients that, “with the popularity of the iOS and the release of HTML5 in 2010, the use of Flash on modern websites has become depreciated. Anyone who views your website on an iPhone, iPod or iPad cannot see the Flash animation, unless a special third party app is installed on their device”.

Just last week I had a potential client call and ask for advice regarding their website. “You called me just in time”, I told the oblivious website owner. “Your entire website is compiled inside of a Flash container, and therefore, a large percentage of your Internet audience can’t see your website at all!”. The client was shocked, as his website was only a year old. It looked real nice, as long as you had Flash installed on your computer. But on an iPhone or iPad, it was a big blank space.

I must admit that I am not an Apple user. I have an Android phone. I have 8 PCs. My son is the only one in my household with an Apple product, which is an iPhone. However as a professional web developer, it is part of my job to be very conscientious about Internet market trends. And the facts are clear. HTML5 is only going to become more predominant over the next few years, which will abate the presence of Flash. Apple continues to refuse to support Flash, and everytime Adobe launches technology to circumvent the lack of Flash support in iOS, Apple swiftly overrides Adobe’s attempts. Mobile devices will soon be the most dominant method for Internet access. And since the iPhone and the iPad dominate mobile Internet access, Adobe Flash has little future.

The last hope for Flash… Amazon Kindle. Only time will tell.

When performing a web design production, or a website design rework, there may be situations where both index.html and index.php are active in your root website directory. During a website transition, you may need to keep these files active until youv’e completed the web design production. Your webserver will default to one or the other, and it may not default to the one you want it to.

You can force the file you want with your .htaccess file.

For instance, to force index.html:

DirectoryIndex  index.html index.php

To force index.php:

DirectoryIndex  index.php index.html

That will make your web design transition a little bit easier.

CSS Reset or Reset CSS  are one of the best ways to ensure you have a consistent web layout and design across all browsers. In this post we discuss the different ways and the advantages or disadvantages of using them.

What is CSS Reset and Why use it?

CSS Reset has been around for quite some time now (thanks to Eric Meyer)and the means to achieve the same are numerous.

Smashing Magazine says

Global Reset is needed to ensure the more or less identical cross-browser presentation of your web-sites. By default different browsers use different values for margin, padding or line-height. Global Reset makes sure all (or probably most) browsers render sites identically.

Let me try to explain why the it is important. Let us assume that a browser decides to change the way the visited links are displayed in violet to black. Now imagine you had been using a non resetting CSS.  Once the page is viewed in the new browser, what used to violet links will now be black. The problem is not with the fact whether the link should be violet or black, but with the fact that it will not be what you would have wanted them to be. To add to it, the same element could be different in different browsers leading to confused users. read more…

In regards to website development, modern web design and content creation utilize a Web 2.0 philosophy comprised of a unified set of standards. Web 2.0 styled Internet websites have a standard set of default web pages, such as About Us, Contact Us, Customer Service, etc. Most Internet users are accustomed to seeing these default web pages, and often seek these web pages for establishing a company’s credibility prior to making a purchase.

A common web 2.0 web design practice is to optimize access to such default pages. Using the standard nomenclature for default web pages will help optimization efforts. Clients often request customizations to these pages, such as changing the title or removal from the primary navigation. For instance, in regards to requesting customer service, consumers are most familiar with the title ‘Customer Service’, therefore changing that title to ‘Customer Satisfaction’ or ‘Customer Care’ may not provide optimal results in regards to website navigation.

Torus geometry object

Let’s say Quality Auto Parts Inc., a regional auto parts dealer, personalizes some standard automobile terminology to help induce a unique corporate image. The owner of the company prefers the term ‘steering torus’ to ‘steering wheel’, and changes this term in all the company’s printed, broadcast, and electronic media. Neither of these terms are incorrect, and they both work well grammatically. However, most consumers immediately relate to the term ‘steering wheel’, almost at a sub-conscience level. The term ‘steering torus’ is not as familiar to a consumer because it is not used regularly by the industry.

Quality Auto Parts Inc. shortly after re-issues new versions of all their printed, broadcast, and electronic media with all instances of the term ‘steering torus’ changed back to ‘steering wheel’.

In respect to media and website usability, specific terminology is relevant. Design personalization is most effectively executed by customizing design elements such as graphics, fonts, colors, etc.

†A torus is a geometrical surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle. Real world examples of torus objects include doughnuts, inner tubes, many lifebuoys, O-rings and Vortex rings.  Learn more about geometric objects such as the Torus.

Click Here to see how I eliminate automated spam on my website forms.

I recently received the following email from one of my web design clients:
“I get 4-5 of these form submissions a week from my website”, writes the client. “Why am I receiving these? Is this something I should be concerned about? Here is a typical sample of the email submission I have been receiving from my website form:

name: ybgsitiei
parent name: ybgsitiei
phone: OZxmqCguQkhdkgZdFY
email: eozrph@wymoxu.com
referred by: JlyXYYFqZqvkenaO

I responded to this client by explaining to them what the emails were, who was sending them and what could be done to eliminate them.

Unwanted email submissions from your website form are usually spam. Spam is unsolicited, invasive advertising that can be compared to a telemarketer calling your home at 6pm on a week night and interrupting your family while eating dinner. If you use email on a regular basis, then you are most likely no stranger to email spam.

For website owners, spam can be received via the forms on their website and any email addresses that are posted on the website. It’s easy to resolve the latter. Just don’t post live email addresses on your website. Webbots called ‘email harvesters’ scan the Internet searching for live email addresses, then save the email addresses they find to a database. The webbot’s programmer then sells the email database to spammers as mail lists. That is why most websites use contact forms in place of posting live email addresses.

But spammers have grown increasingly effective at spamming website forms. Website forms spam can be submitted by humans and by webbots. There is nothing you can do to eliminate human submitted spam, except for removing your website form.

Website forms can be protected from webbots. The first step a website designer can take is restricting webbots from seeing the form page with the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is a website script located in the root of the website directory that tells search engine spiders and webbots what files and directories they are allowed to access. Disallowing a website’s form pages in the robots.txt file will prevent search engine webbots and other Internet webbots scanning programs from reading the website form pages. Search engines will sometimes crawl website forms, submitting an email to the owner with random letters that look like jibberish. By disallowing the website forms with the robots.txt file, you can eliminate some of your websites form spam.

However, persistent spammers will not be stopped by a robots.txt file. The solution for eliminating automated spam submissions in website forms can be acheived by installing a CAPTCHA solution in the website form.

Click Here to see how I eliminate automated spam on my website forms with CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA, is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.  CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used on Internet website forms to ensure that the form submission is not generated by an automated software program, or webbot. The CAPTCHA process asks a user to complete a simple test which the website forms software is able to generate and grade. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type letters or digits from a distorted image that appears on the screen. Because Internet webbots are unable to read a distorted image and solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. CAPTCHA was developed by staff at Carnegie Mellon University and IBM in 2000.

CAPTCHA has become increasingly more common on Internet website forms, and savvy Internet users have become accustomed to completing the CAPTCHA tests on website forms. CAPTCHA use on website forms will continue to increase until the day that webbot software evolve to the point that they can solve the CAPTCHA solution. Only the most sophisticated spammers will utilize such webbot software, so CAPTCHA should be able to protect your website forms for some time.

Michael Rassel is the Owner of Razworks Web Design, a freelance website design company in Sarasota, FL.

To contact Razworks call 941-685-8851

or email Razworks using the contact form by clicking here.

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WordPress Web Design in Sarasota by Razworks

The latest trend in corporate website content management is a software script called WordPress. WordPress is fully a customizable website publishing system that can be used for almost any website. To get a WordPress website, you need website hosting that meets the minimum requirments and a web designer who specializes in WordPress website development, like Razworks. There is also a social network website called WordPress.com, which lets you get started with a new and free WordPress blog website in seconds, but it varies in several ways and is less flexible than the WordPress website you will receive from a WordPress website design specialist, like Razworks.

WordPress began in 2003 with one piece of code to enhance typography of everyday writing. Growing from a handfull of users to the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, WordPress is used on hundreds of thousands of websites and is seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Everything the makes up WordPress, from the source code to the documentation, was created by and for the open source community. WordPress is an Open Source software project, which means there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of people all over the world developing and improving it’s functionality.  (More than most commercial software platforms.) Open Source means you are free to use WordPress for anything from a simple blog page to a Fortune 500 website, without paying anyone a license fee.

To learn more about WordPress, visit WordPress.org