I recently did a makeover to two sites, TraverseLaw.com and WardropLaw.com. I was given the design to use for the first and used a friend to help me with the creative spark on the second one. I of course did all of the coding for both of them. I would appreciate any coding and usability comments about the sites. Are they usable? Do you experience any difficulties navigating around them or experience broken code? I don’t really need feedback on the looks of the sites as that is now set for the most part.

On that same thought process, a friend of mine over at em two design just showed me this site called YourSexyLife.com that they have completed. I really like that design. I think it is probably on my top ten list of all time favorite looks. The site is interesting because it is about living a full life, with sex or celibate, in a way that is sexy. As her tag line says, “sassy, yet classy”. It isn’t the typical type of site I would visit, and yet it somehow drew me in for a read. I was disappointed that she didn’t permit comments, but I guess with a name like that she is worried what she might get back. My friend was showing me the site to show me the quality she was able to obtain on the main gif image on the site. Impressive work!

A mouse peeks quietly from behind the g in Google … what is next? Tomorrow will tell. I love the Google Doodles.

This is kind of fun for a minute. You generate a warning label that you can then print out and put on your sister’s forehead or something else you choose to label.

This is kind of fun (this was originally a link to emailblender.com but appears it has gone out of business) … for a minute anyway. Toss in some words and see what comes out the other end. The email blender allows you to send the output to your friends and see if they can unscramble it. I doubt they can.

On the CIGHTML list that I belong to, one of the participants pointed out this site today for CSS Examples.

I have to say I like what I see. For example, we have worked on several occasions on towards getting drop shadows to work well. He has a simple example of how to do it with nice floats.

Sand Castles, sculptures, creative things built from sand, summer, tans and time away from work with family at the beach. That time of year is fast approaching. My family recently spent a week at the Gulf of Mexico. In years past, we would walk the beach, and every quarter mile or so, there was a sand sculpture, maybe an alligator, a large fortress castle, characters, whatever. It was fun to see them and the often lasted a few days. This year — nothing really. A few castles, but none of the magnitude of years past. Maybe it is a dying art, or maybe there was a convention of sand artists last time?

Here is a neat site that features sand artistry and includes how-to instructions of how you might yourself develop as a sand artist. Of course to really learn how you need to buy his $7 book, but this will get you started. So grab the kids or your significant other and head to a beach or sand box near you!

That led me to this site belonging to Kirk Rademaker, that I think has a very distinctive layout. It is horizontal (requiring scrolling even at my medium high resolution) and sort of looks like the pennants or flags you might see flying at the beach. Very creative.

Web designers these days should at a minimum look at their pages in Firefox, Internet Explorer (painful though that may be), and perhaps Opera and Safari. Often, we tend to overlook the growing number of text only browsers that happen by our sites. Tonight I happened on a great tool to help you see what your page would look like in Lynx, a graphic free browser, should you choose not to load a copy yourself. This tool allows you to see your page like it would appear to a Lynx browser.

That site offers a number of other great tools as well, including:
– a header viewer — see what your server is putting out
– a http request scan — see what you are giving servers such as your browser string, referrer, etc.
– search engine simulator — think like a search engine when looking at your pages
– backwards compatibility check — see what the page looks like with some tag types removed that weren’t supported

While none of these things are “rocket science” in scope, it is still a handly little group of tools for the kit.