Design

Back in mid-2008, Kyle from JoomlaPraise.com approached me about writing a guest post. He was trying to promote AdminPraise, a new design for the Joomla administrator area.

I was sceptical. Very. So sceptical that I asked him to basically defend the need for AdminPraise. His guest post became Are Joomla Admin Templates Worthwhile?.

Fast-forward to early 2009 and I was able to review the next version AdminPraise2 and say: “No-one else is building administrator templates”. I didn’t see the point and it seemed many others didn’t either.

Now in 2010, I’ve got this to say: Kyle, you were right. I was wrong.

Continue reading “Yes, Joomla Admin Templates Are Worthwhile”

This is a guest blog post by Steve Moseley of Hannisdal Express. He previously blogged here on alledia.com, discussing his new site www.simliteraturemedia.org. That project led him to discover a problem with Search Engine Friendly URLs and IE6.

This post is dedicated to Andy from Rockettheme.

Continue reading “Fun with IE6 PNG Filter and Url Rewriting”

In one of a series of guest posts here on the Alledia blog, Kyle Ledbetter of Joomlapraise.com asks whether admin templates are worth the effort.

Over at JoomlaPraise we make Joomla templates and extensions and have recently released AdminPraise, an administrator template for Joomla 1.5 that falls somewhere between a template and extension.

However, the question we’d like to ask is … do Joomla users want/need an alternate admin template?  The admin template system is obviously in place for this reason, but no one really uses it.  We’ve seen slight variations on the Khepri template, but that’s about it.

Continue reading “Are Joomla Admin Templates Worthwhile?”

This is a straight-forward tutorial explaining how you can place different header or logo images on different pages of your site. For example, your sports site may need a baseball player on top of the baseball section, a golf player in the golf section and so on.

How Not to Do It

Create a different template for each page. Believe me, I’ve seen this done with over 30 header image, which means over 30 extra templates.

Continue reading “Different Header Images on Different Pages”

Paul Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” is a classic guide to designing easy-to-use websites. In the book he makes a pretty compelling case for using tabs instead of dropdowns. His prime example is Amazon.com who lead the way in successfully using tabs.

Therefore, I got a big surprise today when I saw that even they’re are using dropdowns and with a really interesting twist …. dropdown menus with boxes instead of an organized list of links.

Continue reading “Amazon Experimenting with Dropdown Boxes”

Its almost common place now to say that newspapers are finished and that all they can look forward to is eeking out a living online, while their paper edition die a slow death.

This is true for most newspapers and in Britain there’s only one newspaper that has consistently been able to overcome the negative predictions.

In late 2003, the Indpendent was a struggling newspaper. It ranked almost last in popularity? among the Britain’s dozen major newspapers. It was then that it made the brave decision to move from being a broadsheet to being a tabloid. Every day the frontpage features a single image or photo trying to grab the readers attention. Some worked and some didn’t but many were little masterpieces of graphic design. 3 1/2 years later it is selling 15.5 per cent more than it did back in September 2003.

While their reporting is good and has won several awards, its their cover photos that really make the Independent stand out. Today, we take a look back at some of the very best graphic design examples from the Independent frontpage over the last 18 months:

Tony Blair’s Legacy	Whale Hunting
Climate Change Prediction	Mental Illness Treatment
New Laws	Heroin in the UK
Record Art Sales	New Laws
Immigration into Europe	Special Aids Issue
SUVs and Climate Change	Climate Change
Haj Photos	Healthcare Problems

?

Click here to see all a list of all Independent frontpages since January 2006.