“The ‘look and feel‘ of a website is the cornerstone of any successful online venture. But the very nature of the internet means that the instant you upload your carefully constructed pages onto the World Wide Web, you’re global. Indeed, regardless of whether you intend to make buckets of cash from your website or simply build a strong international following online, there are numerous aspects of your site’s design you should consider from the start, to ensure it’s flexible and adaptable to international requirements.”
Text
Computers deal with numbers, not letters. Traditionally, there were lots of encoding systems covering different languages, but Unicode changed all that. Unicode provides a unique number for every character, regardless of platform, program or language.
Color symbolism
Color is an important facet of any website. Your choice of colors will depend on whatever product or service you’re selling. However, your choice of colors should also reflect your target audience. To avoid having to overhaul your website when targeting a new market, carefully consider your color scheme from the start.
Content
Nobody will visit your website for the design alone. The online marketing mantra ‘content is king’ certainly rings true for most websites – you have to offer genuinely useful content for your domestic and international visitors.
Domains
It may be cheaper and more convenient to have a single domain for all your target countries, but from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, there’s an argument that says it’s best to have a dedicated top-level domain (TLD) for each of your target countries.
Navigation
Navigation is a crucial aspect of the web design process. Consistency and ‘landmarking’ help web users find their way around your site and. Navigation should be intuitive.
“Choosing a CMS (content management system) is an important first step to building your own website. The CMS provides a simpler way to manage website content without much prior knowledge of HTML, CSS, or other web programming languages. As using the web continues to grow quickly, new CMSs arrive to handle websites in different ways. Below are a few tips on picking the right CMS for your website.”
Choose the CMS that fits your websites purpose
WYSIWYG
Simple Backend Layout
Scalability
Design Template Control
Support View chart on how some CMS handle features
Article on Yanko Design
On 25 January Asymptote Architecture, a New York based architecture practice led by principals Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, has been awarded the Millennium Tower World Business Center (WBCB) in Busan, Korea through an international competition organized by the Busan International Architectural Culture Festival (BIACF) and sponsored by the Municipality of Busan City and the Solomon Group.
The announcement was made on January 23 in Busan after a unanimous decision by jury members selecting Asymptote’s ground breaking design of three separate tapered towers rising out of a robust and powerful base. The Solomon Group, a private Korean developer, intends to move forward with Asymptote’s design for a 560m tall tower, which upon completion will be the tallest building in Asia.
Another interesting article on Design (dot) fr
“Those who stay in apartments crave for spacious bungalows and those who live in landscaped acres dread the maintenance and wish they had lesser rooms to clean! So what really is the ideal size for a home?”
From the architects:“The original builder was also the house’s first resident, and made the most of his triangular plot by allowing the side of the building to fan out to meet the line of the adjacent public footpath. On the ground floor this resulted in an additional fillet of space splitting the living and dining rooms. It was the divisional nature of this space (used as a utility room) that the client asked studio octopi to resolve. By relocating the utility room, the plan was reordered and paved the way for an extension that linked the living spaces.” Read full article
Interesting article on Make Use Of that show you how to install application on flash drive. If you have presentation for your client and they don’t have the software on their computer, then you can run your show on your flash drive without any hassle. Really handy!
“Over the past few years, USB thumb drives have become popular. They transfer files relatively fast (compared to CD’s), happen to be extremely small and unobtrusive, and plug into almost any computer with a USB port. Thanks to the convenience of the modern thumb drive, I can copy files onto a small drive that fits in a change pocket, and transfer them to another computer.
Sites like PortableApps actually have pre-packaged applications that you can install directly to your USB drive. These apps, games, and utilities will run from your USB stick when you plug it into a computer(provided that they’re on the operating system the programs run on). Aibek compiled an excellent list of 100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick that I would recommend checking out if you’re looking for pre-packaged programs to put on your thumb drive.”
Bone tool have been introduced to Flash CS4. You can create bones (armatures) for graphic shapes (like a simple triangle) or a set of movie clips. On Active.tuts+, Steve Dell demonstrate using the bones tool with shapes and will follow up using bones with movie clips.
Output buffering is a simple way to greatly improve the performance and speed of your PHP script. Without output buffering, your script will show the HTML on the page as it’s processed – in pieces. Adding output buffering allows the PHP to store the HTML as a variable and send it to the browser in one chunk.
To enable output buffering, simply add ob_start ( ) like so at the top of the file right after the DOCTYPE like the following: <?php ob_start ( ‘ ob_gzhandler ‘ ) ; ?>
WhatTheFont allows you to identify the fonts in a photo or web graphic.
Just take a photo of the font with your iPhone and the font will be identified. Check it out on MyFonts.com!
Logos represent the brand image, traditions and origins of a company. It is not just a visual badge on the car’s bonnet but represents what people think about the brand and the cars themselves. Somebody driving a Mercedes is perceived as prosperous, mature and of course rich. On the other hand, somebody with an Aston Martin is likely to be a more flamboyant personality. Read full article on Instant Shift
In the late 20th century many new concept was included in the compass of both structure and function. Now days, before performing any action we keeping future in our visions. it also applies in Architecture as well. Article on Instant Shift, Dkumar M presents over 80 Strange & Fantastic Buildings Architecture of modern world. All photographs are linked and lead to the source – the respective photographers.
Noted some websites can only be viewed on Internet Explorer, instead of open the actual IE browser, you can open the Google Chrome browser and install the IE Tab extension, the tool is pretty handy for Mac user.
“The innovative plant perf concept aims to deliver fresh fruits and vegetables to the consumers which eliminate using chemicals that are harmful for health. The plants are get attached with the device right after being cut from the field to get the nutrients from the perf. The body of the device is made from corn starch plastic and features three main parts, the main body, bottle top and nutritious liquid. The long top end of the bottle remains locked when the farmer collects it and during harvesting, the farmer cuts the fruits and insert the stem inside the bottle and locks it by pulling the top upward. Not only fruits, it can also be used to keep flowers fresh for longer period of time according to the user’s need.”
WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used for content management. It has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between.
Envisioned by AGENT, a strategic intelligence embassy, the “CTRUS” is a see-through soccer ball that imitates the bounce of an inflated pneumatic soccer ball, but without losing the air, giving transparency to the game of soccer. In fact, it does not need air to recoil and perform. The hybrid soccer ball comes integrated with an interactive detection system that communicating wirelessly with control stations at the stadium changes its color to display the critical game situations, such as goal, offside, kick force, travel speed and if the ball is over the goal line or outside the field of play, via a GPS/RFID inner light.
