M & M Pest Control has gone live

M and M Pest Management is a Pest control company that contracted us to redevelop their tired old site, we’ve just launched the new site www.mandmpest.com.au.

They supply pest control services all over Sydney, I believe that the new look and user–focused content will further support their customer first repuatation that they have within the industry.

They are really happy with the result and it has been a pleasure working with Ray and the team at M & M.

Work has been flat out - here’s a summary

We’ve been doing a lot of work in collaboration with some top digital
agencies recently, here’s just some of what we’ve been up to.

Information Architecture

• Nestlé Baking
• HSBC Commercial Banking

Standards Based Development

• Act Now!
• Panasonic – coming soon
• Freedom

Accessibility Audits

• Melbourne 2006 Auction site
• Libraries Victoria
• Victorian Sport and Recreation
• Victorian Electorial Commision
• Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development
• eGovernment Resource Centre
• Department for Victorian Communities
• Melbourne Business School
• Business Victoria
• Living in Victoria

Old–school development

• Noise.net

City of Sydney has gone live!

City of Sydney has finally gone live, there still needs to be a few tweeks, but overall I think everything is looking good.
I was sub–contracted to do the ‘webstandards based’ templates based on Massive’s designs, it took just 1 month to do all the CSS, HTML and browser tweaking then hand it over to COS’s in–house web team. I think they’ve done a good job using the templates.

Due to the design having to work across a fair amount of browsers the CSS is fairly complex I know, but it’s really going to give them so much more flexibility when it comes to their next re–design.

IE7 is coming

In an incredible reversal of statements Bill Gates has announced that IE7 will be out the middle of this year. Whether this is going to be simply a security fix or a more dramatic improvement in the CSS rendering engine no one knows.

I will speculate now that our wishes for a better rendering engine will most likely not come true as I really believe that this is just another ploy to remain at the top of the table after the past several months of Firefox taking browser share from IE.

IE’s lack of browser development over the last 5 years has been a thorn in the side of the web expanding its capabilities. Microsoft originally wasn’t going to be releasing a new standalone browser, it was going to be a part of the next OS called Longhorn, but with the delivery date of Longhorn continually slipping and IE’s browser share slipping as well, I can only presume this is a ploy to increase customer confidence.

According to the MSDN blog, it will be offered to Windows XP users and be available for beta testing come middle of the year.

So I’m looking forward to the latter part of the year and all the browser testing we’ll be doing.

Max Coaching has gone live!

Well we’ve finally been able to get around to redeveloping Max Coaching’s web site.

Because we developed the site using web standards, Max Coaching has found that they get high rankings in Search Engines, and quicker load times for customers, this all leads to clients finding them and being happy with their browsing experience (therefore enhancing the Max Coaching brand).

We designed the logo, website & full array of print material, including: With Comps, Business Cards, Letterheads, PowerPoint Templates & PDF templates.

Max Coaching recieves approx 90% of their business through their web site so it had to look good and be fast, I think we’ve been able to achieve both.

If you’d like to find out more about what we can do for your web site, please contact us.

MSN goes CSS based layout

Microsoft portal site MSN has just updated their underlying codebase to use CSS for their layout & styling — not a <font> tag anywhere, I can’t believe it.

For a long time I have been bagging Microsoft for their lack of standards based support within IE, but it seems that someone at Microsoft understands where things are heading — maybe there’s hope for them yet.

Great to see yet another big name using webstandards!

IBM, Linux & IE Lock–in

​​​​Sam Palmisano, the CEO of IBM, challenged his entire company to migrate to Linux for their desktop systems by the end of this year. Turns out things aren’t going so well.

IBM is running into this one tiny little problem. You may have heard of it, it’s called Internet Explorer. See, many internal IBM web applications were written with IE-proprietary code, and darned if that isn’t just one big, huge migration hurdle right there.

If the object lesson here isn’t obvious enough, this is the point: When you code for a single browser, you create a tight lock-in to that
particular software that you will later regret. Instead, if you embrace web standards and code for any browser, your sites and applications will continue to work without a costly code re-purposing budget.

Flexible Rounded Corners

Rounded corners, from a design perspective have been around for a while, and Lori from Zenful Creations posed a new and interesting design problem on the webstandards group list today, and the solution took a while to come… but here it is. I have now tested and adjusted it to work in all browsers, even works in IE5 on Mac… so enjoy.

Update:

I’ve just added another page that uses 2 .gifs instead of 1 - because there was a problem with the image repeating further down the page (if your box content was incredibly long), this can be overcome if you have an incredibly large image, but I prefer to use 2 as that shouldn’t break.

Update: – 09/06/05

By request I’ve just added an example with columns, I’ve also comment in the CSS layout section 3 various ways for layout:

• using absolute positioning
• floats using percentage for widths and margins
• floats using fixed width for left column

So to try the various ways for layout, just un–comment the statement areas that’s like to try, make sure to comment out the unused statements.

Web inaccessibility ‘creates net underclass’

In a recent article published by The Register it has been said that:

“Companies and public bodies are still failing to take accessibility into account when designing their websites…. this lack of action on accessibility is creating an internet underclass.”

It also goes on to say that companies are developing their sites to only work on Internet Explorer; while I have seen this to be true time and time again, I believe that, within Australia at least, there has been a real move towards Standards-based development, and it seems that companies are starting to realise the ROI that this type of development ensures.

XMLHttpRequest comes of age

It seems that XMLHttpRequest has now come of age with the recent beta testing of Google Suggest and Drew McLellan has an article that’s worth a read. It has also been included into the whatwg.org standards so it seems that for the new world of web apps it’s going to be common place.

This technology is really going to heat up in 2005.