Web Design and Development

Obviously its been a while since posting, but I figure I will start up again and start sharing some information, tutorials and what not. I always feel if your not going to post regularly then don’t post, I’m sure a few people would disagree with that.

Anyone in the Ann Arbor area should definitly com checkout out our next Refresh Detroit meeting. All the details are listed on our website. We are doing a demo night, where anyone can come and show us their latest websites, designs, applications, tools, and products. You do have to RSVP if you are wanting to demo something, so please checkout out the site for more details.

For anyone that doesn’t know what Refresh Detroit is, we are a group of web developers, designers, usability specialist and anyone who has a passion for the web. We get together to talk about industry trends, special techniques, marketing and a whole assortment of topics.

If you are like me, then most others involved in your life don’t really care about how you used some really cool techniques to code a web site or hear you talk about the usability of a certain site, kind of sucks! The best is how my girlfriend gets so annoyed when I view the source of a site we are randomly checking out. Only us web nerds can understand that type of stuff, so why not get together and talk about it with each other.

With that said, look forward to hearing more post on various ecommerce topics. Since starting my career in ecommerce last year, I have been working on a lot of cool things such as Comparison Shopping Engines, Affiliate Marketing and my dive into the world of software engineering.

I’m not sure what most of you do for your slicing technique in Photoshop, but I always had been old school and used the Marquee Tool. Most developers or graphic designers are taught to use the slicing tool, which annoys the crap out of me especially because of the Save For Web functionality, I can never get it to just save the image where I want it.

In the past I have always selected the area that I want to slice with the Marquee Tool, and went into the layers pallet, clicked on the options and chose Flatten Image. I could now copy that slice and open a new document, pasting in the copied image.

Then I found the biggest time saver of my career, cutting my slicing frustrations in half. What is it, you say? Its the Copy Merged option. I’m not sure how long this has been built into Photoshop but I do feel stupid if it has always been there.

Now, all you have to do is select the area you want to slice with the Marquee Tool, or any other selection tool you would like, then go up to the edit menu and select “Copy Merged” or better yet Shift+Ctrl+C and boom, no flattening of the image, meaning none of the hassle of having to go back in History to retrieve your layers. Now just click Ctrl+N for a new Document, Ctrl+V to paste, then Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S, and boom your in the “Save For Web” screen. Of Course for all the MAC user I’m sure you can figure out the MAC alternative.

Yeah, I might be behind with this, and I just saw this has been here since the first release of CS, but I never really looked because I always just did it the old school way. Feel free to comment about any slicing tips, or other time saving shortcuts in Photoshop.

I have been so busy between freelance and the full time job I haven’t had much time to update my site nor my blog with many posts. I figured I should post this soon since it has been almost a month since the launch.

Ann Taylor
Ann Taylor LOFT

Last year around this time I started doing my contract gig at Fry, it was the biggest step by far in my career and has led me to the great job at Niche Retail. Even though the sites aren’t perfect web standard examples (not by my choice!), It was still my first time working with a major nationally known development company. I worked with many engineers, system architects, and project managers. This is much different then the normal freelance jobs where you work with a client or are contracted out from a web firm.

I learned that the process is so much more complex in this environment, from building the site inside of java platform and having to compile the project just to see the changes, to committing the changes and waiting for it to be deployed to the dev server, where then people tell you there are changes to be made and you start the whole process over again. Not to mention the hours and hours of tasks that come from QA testing! Lets not forget updating the project and having tons of the engineers code conflicting with yours.

I think this is why I love my job so much now, not to mention the great company and their philosophy but working in side of something that is a bit more of a challenge then just coding some XHTML and CSS templates and handing them over. Its that added complexity that makes you strive to be the best at what you do. Where would we be if our jobs became easy and not challenge us anymore. The challenge being now to turn this platform into the best it can be in terms of Web Standards and Accessibility. We are way off but in the 3 months I have been here, we have made tremendous progress!

I have been really busy lately with work and other things in life, I barely have time to think. I wanted to show everyone what I have been working on at the job since starting. A lot of stuff we work on we don’t go as public about because it wouldn’t be professional to do so for our partners/affiliates, so I can’t always divulge all of our work.

Today we launched a Refresh (as we like call it), to our header and footers areas of the sites. This is more then just a redesign but an actual initial overhaul of the existing structure. We are also working on some great homepage redesigns for our sites. It has been a lot of fun and I’m really excited to see the results of the hard work we have been doing the last few months.

This was the first step in the right direction, in terms of cleaning up the front end code and really giving our sites an updated look and feel. There is still a lot of work to be done, so don’t bash me to quickly on what can use improvements, if your looking at the source code or CSS files. We have several e-commerce sites, so it is going to be a very tedious process, one that I like to look at as a war with many small battles. At the end I hope to bring our sites to the front of the pack in terms of web standards and e-commerce.

here are some of the sites to check out:

http://runbikes.com/
http://childcarriers.com/
http://bicycletrailers.com/
http://europeanstroller.com/

While your checking them out buy something for your kids, or your friends kid’s. You won’t get much of a better customer experience on any other e-commerce site.

For the last week I have been dealing with the biggest headache. My domain registrar Registerfly has always sucked. The only reason I stayed with it was the fact I had started using them when I first got into the web. I accumulated so many domains that I didn’t want to spend the money to transfer.

I am changing host this last week and wanted to transfer my domain names as well. It turns out that Registerfly has become the worst domain registrar ever. First they loose their ICANN accreditation, since then the owner, Kevin Medina has decided to take control of people domains by deleting them, not unlocking them for transfer and they are currently under a class action lawsuit. I knew I should of just transferred back in January…

I don’t even know if I will have this domain anymore. It says that the transfer has initiated but who knows if it will work. Two of my other domains are unlocked in the Registerfly control panel but I got errors from my new registrar, saying they are locked. Of course Registerfly isn’t responding to the support tickets and emails, though I expected this because its the main problem people are having.

Besides that, I have moved to a great new host, Media Temple. I have seen so much about these guys on other blogs, of which I highly respect. I figured I would give them a go and I am truly happy. I think everyone should check out their great hosting, its different then any other hosting I have seen in the past. I got the Grid Server hosting, which offers the following

• 100 GBs of premium storage
• 1 TB of short-path bandwidth
• Host up to 100 individual sites
• 1000 email accounts
• 64 MB Ruby/Mongrel container
• Money Back Guarantee

All for just $20 a month, also I would say its the best control panel I have used. I will keep you guys updated with the experience I have with them in the future.