Web Design/Development

[Neeox]

Just interested to know whether there is anyone here interested in web design or development?

I have a large interest in it and have taught myself a fair bit in the topic over the past 2 years and next year i undergo 2 courses to gain qualifications in it (Certificate III and a Diploma in Web Development).

So anyone else have even the slightest interest in it, or digital graphic design?

- Neeox

[Elmo]

I developed my site at work.  It is constantly in development, and being re-worked.

Pretty light on graphics, but graphics is not my strong point, and not really in the intrest of our target audience, who just want's information on what is available to them.

The large type-font also is targeted torwards our audience, and is a confirmed strong-point.

Always remember, it's your audince that must like what you do.

Originally done in PERL/MySql, now done in PHP/MySQL.

I wish I had more then a couple of hours/week to work on it.  So many things I want to add.....

Modified to remove link.

[Neeox]

Oh i see, so you more-so just created the site for your work, you dont actually have a great interest in it?

I dunno if you are allowed to post links to your website though, but you are right, it is very light on graphics which i dont particuraly like.

[Elmo]

I have a strong intrest in the mechanics and interacting with databases, not so much in the graphics.  I loved PERL, but it was far too picky for my time.  PHP is adequate.  My only wish is that I understood more object-oriented programming, and the use of classes.

For my target audience, it works great (Older folksa with the money to spend 6-100K on a cruise, and the time to do it..  The information they want is there, it is readable for them, and will work in almost all browsers, which we need because we still get 5% of our traffic from older (pre-IE6/NS6 browsers.

We had a resort site, but it was too much work for the amount of income generated.  It was heavy on graphics, and limited on browsers due to the style sheets.  It was definitly not worth re-working to function difirently for difirent browsers.

Always remember, design for your audience.

And good luck, which I forgot to put in the original response.

[Wízzßång]

I agree with Elmo.  I like working with PHP/MySQL.  I'm interested in doing the backend functional stuff rather than the graphics stuff.  I'm working with my friend on an open source syslog server that logs to a mysql database instead of files.  He is writing the c++ stuff for the daemon and I'm writing the website to view/search the data.  Similar to what Splunk does, only open source.

[Neeox]

Yeah i guess so, thats pretty good Elmo. I would prefer PHP over Perl aswell.

Syslog Server aye, sounds interesting, how long are you expecting it to take?

[Wízzßång]

We've already gotten it working, we're just refining the C code to make it parse out the fields a little nicer so I can search on more fields within the message.

[ºReFº]

I have no experience with the computer language you guys all talk. But, I have heard BFM_Kikn talk about all that stuff and I've seen many websites he has made and I personally think they look great. As a little side project and favour he did for BFM he was the one who made www.bfmstats.com for our captains scrim stats. I'd suggest if you wanna talk website design maybe drop him a PM. =D

[Neeox]

Awsome Wizzbang, you will be releasing it to the public?

Kikn has done a nice job on BFM stats, seems like he has a fair knowledge on PHP and using PHP to manipulate images (those stats sigs,considering thats how he has worked them).

[Frost 2.0]

Hey Neeox

I'm a professional Web designer. I have my own design business and I also work for a university where I produce and maintain two Web sites as my fulltime job.

My background is design though. I am a fair coder (I work with Fireworks and Dreamweaver) but that's not my strength. Fortunately, here at the University we have a staff of people who help me with that when I need it. I was hired based on my design strengths and the bulk of my job is making sure new content is added such that it looks right

Lately I've been doing a lot of usability testing on my sites. That's a fascinating process and very informative about how the sites' audiences actually behave with and interact with the sites I've designed. Sometimes I want to reach through the screens and hit them (I watch the recorded video of the sessions) but for the most part it's REALLY interesting to watch. Both of my sites will get full redesigns based on the usability reports when they're done.

 - frost

[freddd]

I run a very simple HTML page for my Boy Scout Troop, but I am starting to look into more PHP (as I hardly know any PHP). I love website design, and I'm always trying to learn more.

[Wízzßång]

Awsome Wizzbang, you will be releasing it to the public?

Once it's ready for beta testing, we will probably make a sourceforge page for it.

[ÞÛmª]

As freddd said, he has the HTML page, while my half of that site is in php
I also work on a community bulletin board / forums which is PHP and MySQL (duh ).
Alot of the page is also AJAX... all based off of vBulletin.
I actually prefer to do graphic design, using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and an older version of Fireworks (pre-Adobe).
That makes sense to log to a MySQL database, but I can't really see an application where that would be necessary... Why did you decide to make it?

[Wízzßång]

The reason you want to log to a database instead of flat files is because eventually you have to rotate out the syslog files.  Depending how large your network/server farm is, you may have several megs to several hundred megs of syslog messages a day.  If you are rotating the syslog files every day, it gets hard to search through them all if you have to go back and look for an event.  If it is in a database, then you can do queries by date, source IP, severity, facility, and within the message.  That is all much easier to search through in a database compared to several huge files.