Photoshop: Quick Tip - Push Your Pixels x 10

Posted by Jennifer | May 22, 2006 | Leave A Comment

When you have the Move tool (V) selected in Photoshop you can move an entire layer, or if you’ve made a selection, you can move the selection using the arrow keys on the keyboard Up, Down, Left or Right. Each time you press an arrow, your layer or selection will move 1 pixel in that direction. If you want to speed things up, you can hold down the Shift key and at the same time press an arrow and now the object will move 10 pixels at a time.

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Photoshop Tips

Website Launch : Bernie Keating Photography

Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 21, 2006 | Leave A Comment

Laughing Lion Design have just finished putting the final touches to Bernie Keating’s website. (Cue blowing of own trumpet) and I think it looks great.

Bernie Keating Photography Website - Design and Developed by Laughing Lion Design

Bernie is a superb photographer based in Ireland who specialises in editorial, documentary, landscape and commercial photography. The website features a large gallery of her work and the all important contact details.

Posted by Jennifer Farley | Filed Under Website Design

People’s Photography

Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 21, 2006 | Leave A Comment

Tomorrow and Sunday there is a free outdoor photography exhibition around St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin. All levels of photography are represented and it’s nice to chat to exhibitors and visitors. I will be exhibiting my AMATEUR prints there on Saturday.

If you’d like to see a few of my pics check out “Along The Nile” - photographs from Egypt site.

Posted by Jennifer Farley | Filed Under Photoshop Tutorials

Web Design : Usability Testing

Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 18, 2006 | Leave A Comment

Usability testing is a vitally important part of the web design process. It is not difficult to put together a usability study. The following tips will help you get the most out of your testing and research.

1. You will need a number of participants who fit into the target audience profile for the website. There is no point using a set of web-savvy teenagers to test a site aimed at holidays for seniors.

2. Decide on your questions and the tasks you want your group to complete. Are you tyring to get a user response to colour schemes, fonts used, or how the navigation works? You need to figure out what you’re actually measuring.

3. A tried and tested methodology in usability testing is to get your users to rate different attributes along a sliding scale from a strong negative to a strong positive. For example, “Do you think the colours used in the site are complimentary and convey a strong idea of …”

4. Try different layouts of your pages and variations on your site. Find out which alternatives work best for your test subjects.

5.Watch what your testers DO as well as what they say. You may find that your testers say they can find the search box, but did they really. Without any intervention, try to see what’s going on, on screen.

6. Set a time limit for your testers to complete certain tasks and stick to it.

And that’s all there is to it. Ok, maybe you might want to buy your testers a drink or give them some choccies to say thanks.

Posted by Jennifer Farley | Filed Under Website Building

Dreamweaver: Quick Tip - Font Lists

Posted by Jennifer | May 18, 2006 | Leave A Comment

Dreamweaver provides a fairly limited default list of fonts in the Properties Inspector and the various dialog boxes. If you’d like to make your own font lists or rearrange the order of the Dreamweaver lists you can do this by selecting Text > Font > Edit Font List.

This opens up the Edit Font List dialog box where you can choose from Available fonts on your system to create a new list. You can also type in the name of any font, even if you don’t have it on your system in the field below the available fonts list. It’s a good idea to finish your list with serif or sans-serif – this is basically a catchall so that if you’re unfortunate enough to make a specific list of fonts that NOBODY has, you can still determine what TYPE of font will appear on your web pages.

Dreamweaver font lists

Once you create a font list, it will appear in the places font lists usually appear and even in the code hints for CSS.

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Design Stuff!

Web Design : What the heck are plugins?

Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 15, 2006 | Leave A Comment

Having worked “in” and “on” the Internet for several years, much of the lingo used becomes second nature and becomes part of your vocabulary. However, if you’re new to the web, it can be fairly confusing, if not intimidating. Over the next few blog posts I’m going to explain some of the words you may hear when discussing websites.

So what’s a plug-in?
Plug-ins are little bits of software that let you do certain things with your Internet browser. For example, if you want to listen to music or watch a video, you must have the right plug-in on your computer, or nothing will happen. If you wanted to play a game that uses Shockwave and you don’t have it on your computer you will be asked if you want to install it. They are called plug-ins because they ‘plug in’ to your Internet browser when you download them onto your computer, and generally they will install automatically.

Where do you get plug-ins?
When you go to a site that needs a plug-in, your browser will automatically know and ask you whether you want to download the required plug-in. If you do need to download a plug-in, you usually click on a link and the plug-in will be downloaded and installed on your computer - it really requires very little work from the user. Once it’s installed, you don’t have to worry about it again.

So why are the plug-ins not part of the browser as standard? Well, the problem is that it is just not practical because there are hundreds of plug-ins and new ones are created all the time, so it would be impossible to include them all in your browser and keep them up to date.

It also makes sense to keep the basic browser as small a possible to make it easier to install and then individual users can decide what extra functionality they require.

Generally plug-ins are be free but occasionally a company will ask for a fee for a more sophisticated or professional version. As a casual individual user it is unlikely that you would ever need the paid for versions - the free versions should do everything you want.

Popular plug-ins

Real Player - this is one of the most popular sound and video players on the web
Flash Player - used for animations and games, this comes pre-installed on nearly all modern internet browsers, you may need to download a newer version
Shockwave Player - used for 3d animations and games
Acrobat - this free reader is required to look at PDF files
QuickTime - used for high quality video (preferred on Macs)
Windows Media Player - Microsoft’s media player plays sound and video files