Put simply, if you are not online: You are most definetely missing out on potential clients/customers. Here is a video showing you the state of the internet (and this is 6 months ago):

If you are still not on the internet and are considering it, NOW would be a good time to contact someone to have a chat about what the internet could do for your business.

As I noticed this I turned to google to see if anyone else had looked into exactly what some of these new design features included. But to my surprise there is not alot of buzz online about this. Apart from a reference about how to enable the new google design (a version I have not been able to see) it was all very quiet.

Therefore I thought I would share some of the screenshots (taken from Firefox 3.6 on a PC) we have taken in the office, and have a look at some of the changes that are being tested.

Redesign of the Google homepage

At the time of taking these screenshots I managed to get 3 different versions of the Google homepage. The first is the one I see on a day to day basis in minor varieties, the second one is where we start seeing changes and the third includes the new Google logo.

Fig.1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Lets start with the changes in Fig. 2

1. The first change that you can see is the search input itself, a larger version with a nice drop shaddow, moving away from the out of the box un-styled input we have come to now.
2. The second major change is the buttons themselves, at first I thought I had used Opera to view the homapage but no chance, we now have styling for the buttons as well.
3. The font size has been increased to 11 pixels from 10, the colour has changed and the underline has been changed to the hover state.
4. Again the underline has changed to the hover state and the colour is different.
5. The copyright and Privacy link again, have been increased in size and the link changed.

And taking the changes pointed out above let’s look at Fig. 3

1. Of course we have the new logo, a much brighter version.
2. And in this version they have again reduced the size of the copyright and privacy link

Redesign of the Google Search results

After a homepage change like that, how can we not have a look at what happens when you search? Fig. 4 is the old version and fig. 5 is the new one.

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Let’s have a look at Fig. 5 and see what’s new.

1. Again the new Google logo
2. The Search is followed through, and here you also have an attached search button on the right. Using slight gradients and borders to give the effect of a 3D button.
3. The biggest change however is the left hand menu which displays icons for earch of the sections  all the time.
4. The footer got a complete revamp with the newer oooooooooooo’s and gone is the bar with the light blue background

I did notice that depending on if (1) you are logged into your Google account or not and (2) your Google settings, it displays things more personalised in the left hand menu.

Redesign of the Google Image Search

Now let’s have a look at image search, most changes we have already covered, however; you might like the fact that the images sorting options (previously +Show options) are now located permanently in the left hand side menu.

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Personally I quite like all of the changes I have seen, but I fear too many tests could scare the unsure surfer. Google is to a lot of people “the Internet” and if it does not look the same everytime it might make people nervous. A/B testing is all good and well, but as Douglas Bowman will tell you “I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data”.

What do you think of the changes Google are trying out, good, bad, or you just don’t care?

However, just because we’ve selected our fonts it might not look the same too everyone. Different computers and different browsers deal with fonts in their own way. Below we will show you the most common fonts and the ones used up to 90% on the internet. We have included them in the most common sizes shown online for you to explore. If you are keen enough you might look at this from more than one computer and see the differences.

Font size 12 px

Font size 14 px

Font size 16 px

We have a lot of people requesting we use the fonts in their logos and or fonts they use in their email signatures etc. Unfortunately the web does not render fonts like other software on your computer might do, let me show you a few examples. To prove my point I will not set any secondary font, so if your current browser and computer does not support this font it will go to your system default font.

Comic Sans – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Century Gothic – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Arial Black – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Impact – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Gill sans – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Papyrus – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Comic Sans – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Century Gothic – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Arial Black – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Impact – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Gill sans – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Papyrus – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Comic Sans – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Century Gothic – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Arial Black – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Impact – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Gill sans – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Papyrus – Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

As you can see some of these become quite illegible in certain font sizes, which we really don’t want to put your customers/users through, that is why we try and keep your fonts to the most common ones.

As some of our own clients experienced themselves first hand this week when one of our premium web servers which is hosted in one of Europe’s largest data centres suffered a technical fault on Monday morning, leaving many of our clients website’s inaccessible for a brief time. Our engineers were quick to access the problem and took the necessary actions to resolve the situation as soon as possible. It turned out that the morning glitch had caused one of the safety duplicated hard disks to loose its integrity and synchronisation with the  other hard drive prompting the Linux programme safety system to shut down the system safely, restart itself in rescue mode and begin the two hour process of checking the disk integrity and re-mirroring them back to a synchronised status.

These things do happen in the world of computers as many of us have come to realise with our own PC’s, but when it comes to a web server, which is constantly in use at a high level along with the millions of server requests by robot programs continually scanning the Internet probing the Internet for system vulnerability amongst other things, that we manage to stay up and running 99.9% of the time. The 0.1% accounts for unfortunate times like these when technical problems will inevitably occur.

With YouTube being down it does seem that there is no escape from the clutches of the Internet gremlins! Although our own hosting solutions have only experienced two brief moments of downtime this year, we are implementing additional investment to take the best possible care of our servers. This will help in monitoring continuously and have support on any problems 24/7 which will subsequently reduce any unforeseen downtime.

It features a 2 column layout and the features include: dropdown top menu for categories; customizable retweet script on all posts and pages, footer navigation and a bright lemon look.

It comes cufon ready using “Franklin Gothic Heavy”, but can easily be changed.

The theme has been tested and is compatible (to our best knowledge) with IE6, IE7, Firefox 3+, Opera 9+ and Safari 3+.

Installation:

To install the theme, first unzip the files and then upload the entire folder to wp-content/themes, within your WordPress installation on your server. Then go to your WP admin panel, and under the ‘Appearance’ tab, select ‘Themes’. Find the Bright lemon theme and activate it.

Retweet Javascript

We decided to include a javascript Retweet button on all posts and pages. To track the traffic going on twitter you should change 2 lines of code, don’t worry it isn’t scary. First of all create yourself an account on bit.ly. Once registered you can go to your account page and there you can find your API Key (example:R_90b75884bc70ce4ac35d8e3b7e000c1d) copy that, your own; not the example.

Then you open the retweet.js file in the theme. And now for my favourite kind of coding, “copy and paste”. On line 18 of the javascript file you replace our API key with your own, you also need to enter your bit.ly username on line 14. And that is all the coding needed, as Mike would say:
- Simples!

Credits

There is a small credit link back to this site, in the footer. We consider it a small token of appreciation if you leave it there. We have after all given you this WordPress theme for free

Support

This is a free WordPress theme and is provided with no guarantee. If you have a question or want to report a bug we recommend you post a comment below, or for general WordPress queries try the official WordPress support forum. We will try and support this theme as much as possible, but as you know; bills also need to be paid, and that will have to take priority.

Fine prints!

This theme is available for free and you can use it for commercial or personal purposes. It is released under a GPL license. You may however NOT use the theme for websites dedicated to: pornography/adult sites, warez, drugs and anything encouraging offensive/illegal behavior.
]]> http://www.webdezign.co.uk/blog/design-blog/free-wordpress-2-9-theme-bright-lemon/feed/ 0 http://www.webdezign.co.uk/blog/design-blog/free-wordpress-2-9-theme-bright-lemon/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/web-design-london/~3/ghVD0CTpKKM/ http://www.webdezign.co.uk/blog/technology/google-to-phase-out-support-for-ie6/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:19:20 +0000 admin http://www.webdezign.co.uk/blog/?p=564 From the 1st of March 2010 Google are to phase out support for Internet explorer 6, the so called weak link in recent cyber attacks that compromised Google itself.  Google threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market following the “sophisticated and targeted” attacks, which originated in China; recently reported on the BBC website.

Following Google’s revelations the French and German governments advised users not to use the out of date browser and recommended to upgrade to a later version as soon as possible. We have recommended upgrading IE6 to all our clients for a long time now, but the reality is that some firms have not bothered or do not have the access to roll this out. If you are reading this in IE6 we would strongly recommend upgrading IE6 now, or better still try downloading Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Googles Chrome or even Opera; which are safe, fast and have intuitive interfaces.

Google have said there will be no more support for their online software beginning with Google Docs and Google Sites which may no longer work on IE6. This also applies to the popular website YouTube. In quick response Microsoft released a patch 3 weeks ahead of its regular security update which is unusual.

In a twist, on the 2nd of February a petition was released on the governments’ website calling to drop IE6 and move the latest IE browser. The petition says that IE6 has security flaws and uses outdated technology, creating a burden for developers. Since there are limitations to what will work on IE6 the web developing industry have been restricted in the use of new website technology which they still have to test and support since there are 20% of online users still using the outdated version. Other government departments and many firms still use the old browser, which was first released in 2001.

“Most creative and software development companies are forced by government department clients to build websites for IE6 when most of the industry has moved on,” the petition reads.

“Upgrading would be a massive task for government, but if the public is encouraged to lead the way and the government follows, that would create the momentum needed.”

The petition was set up by Dan Frydman of web firm Inigo.

It seems our long wait for IE6 to be abandoned may almost be over and we can start doing our job… even better.

We thought we would give away some free glassy buttons! They are made using Photoshop and each button is made up from 2 layers and a text-layer above, each in it’s own group.

You can use them as they come or edit in any way you want.

Download the PSD (File size is 1.19MB)

More free PSD buttons

HTML and CSS example

Sign up for Free! Sign up for Free!

Download the PSD (File size is 345kb)

Tomboy is a note taking application from GNOME written in C#. I first came across Tomboy notes when using the Ubuntu LiveCD.

Its ease of use make using Tomboy as natural as handwritten notes. The first thing I noticed was the decluttering of my physical desks after moving over to Tomboy notes. I still use pen and paper most of the time, but I tend to transfer any important notes to Tomboy.

My main use for Tomboy is for creating cheat sheets of code snippets. In addition to my general notes, I have one note for PHP snippets to initiate debug tracing or to turn on error reporting. I have another note for Perl one-liners and other useful Linux stuff.

The most powerful feature of Tomboy is its ease of syncronisation. This is really useful if say, while at work you realise you need to add something to your home todo list. Another lifesaver was when I needed to provide emergency server support at the weekend out of the office. I could view my Linux cheat sheet from home while shelling to the server.

It took me six months how to figure out how to get syncing working on XP, until I realised Dropbox could sync with a local folder on Windows. Dropbox is a file storage and synchronisation provider who gives free storage up to 2GB. I have yet to find a wholly open-source solution for synchronisation that works cross-platform.

Many other posts on the internet cover syncing Tomboy with Dropbox using the Synchronization add-in. The problem with this is that you can only sync one set of notes, i.e. either your home or your work notes not both. So I put my problem to the Tomboy mailing  list. Sandy Armstrong, who develops Tomboy, got back to me saying instead of using the Synchronization add-in, just get Dropbox to sync your notes folder. The great thing about this was that I could keep two sets of notes in sync.

So to do this, run Tomboy with the –note-path option. For example on both my home and work machine I have the following shortcut to run Tomboy with a note path within my drop box:

"C:\Program Files\Tomboy\Tomboy.exe" --note-path "C:\Documents and Settings\Joe Bloggs\My Documents\My Dropbox\tbnotes\home"

This shortcut opens up my home notes. To access my work notes, I have a separate directory called work and so replace “home” with “work” in the above shortcut.

One more thing, Sandy recommended using the NoteDirectoryWatcher which updates notes if they happened to be changed while it is open.

In both versions I included the PSD so you can edit the sprites file if you wish to play around with it. Each zip file contains:

• 1 html file
• 1 css file
• 1 logo
• 1 sprite image

You are completely free to use them as is or modify these templates.

DownloadDemo

DownloadDemo

If you are interested in more layouts like these please leave a comment and let us know what kinds you would like to see more of.

Web designers london

Google image search SERP

And like in so many of these cases only one of us in the office has had the pleasure of seeing this version. Could this become a permanent feature of the Google Image search, we found it very useful so hopefully it will.