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I’m happy to announce the launch of a brand new website, See Spark Go! My good friends Andy and Brittany Thoms from See Spark Go approached me a few months back to develop their redesigned website. The guys over at Matchstic did a KILLER job designing the group’s new branding and identity strategy and part of which was a fresh new website.

This was a really  fun project to work on. I had the privilege of developing the entire site from concept to buildout as well as integrate a host of CMS controls for Brittany to be able to take the site and run with it.

Check it out here – http://www.seesparkgo.com

After I had spent a few good hours implementing a jQuery cycle for a client to display an unordered list of current promotions and services I was asked to strip the auto-rotating array and have the site display a random list item each time the site loads. Seemed simple enough. But before I spent time searching jQuery or Javascript solutions to do the random math to achieve this, I thought surely I could hammer this out in PHP just as quickly. Here’s what I came up with:

//QUERY CURRENT PROMOTIONS DB BASED ON RANDOM NUMBER CHOSEN

	$q1 = "SELECT * FROM currentpromotions ORDER BY rand() LIMIT 1";
	$r1 = mysql_query($q1,$dbcnx);

Basically what’s going on here is in my query to the database I limit the results to 1. I randomly choose the result to show by using the rand() function. Normally, you could do some fun things like count the records and limit the results from there, but the unique challenge here is you don’t want to assume that the records will always be in perfect incrementing order (say a record gets deleted or skips a number in the id field). This method doesn’t put any numeric value on the user’s part but rather takes all of the records present and chooses a random result from there.

So you think you’re pretty good at web development, eh? Well there’s always room to grow and with the way new media changes and new technologies emerge, it’s always great to stay on top of the current trends in development. One web resource you absolutely can’t live without is CSS Tricks. The website/blog powerhouse hosted by Chris Coyier features tutorials and working demos of tons of little known development tricks and CSS tips. Perhaps the most practical aspect of the whole site is the video screencast that Chris does where he basically shows you from start to finish how to accomplish a host of things in CSS and HTML. Mark it on your reader and stay on top of what’s new in digital design.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I think web accessibility should be of upmost importance to web designers and developers alike. Creating functional sites that can be viewed on a variety of mediums be it a personal computer, PDA, iPhone, and other portable devices is just as important as a site’s visual appeal. While Flash may be catchy and neat, the nuts and bolts of a site, in my opinion, really defines its overall quality. Here are some tips to make your site more accessible that I’ve learned over the past few months. Feel free to add to the list in your comments. I know this list may seem to ruin a lot of the fun in creating web projects, but usability is king.

• Design your site using CSS
• Use semantic tags (h1, h2, p)
• Don’t forget alt tags on your images
• Validate your HTML and CSS
• Avoid images used for navigation
• Minimize flashing, scrolling, or moving content
• Use label tags for every form input field

Inspired by an article I read a few months ago written by Bill Merikallio and Adam Pratt entitled “Why tables for layout is stupid,” I began to reassess everything I thought I knew about web design. Sure, slicing Fireworks concepts into HTML tables was easy enough and gave me complete visual control over what I was designing, but what about standards? Standards, what?? Nobody ever told me about standards!! You mean to tell me I can get my sites to load faster, be accessible over multiple platforms and mediums, get better search engine results, and make updating my site easier? I wanted in. And now my world has been opened up to a whole new perspective. Changes styles across a multitude of pages is a breeze with CSS and semantic based tags gives my new designs a logical order and consistency that a myriad of classes can never do. It just makes sense!

Must Reads:
» Why Tables for Layout is Stupid!
» Liquid CSS Layouts – Design Alternative to Table Based Websites