Codeistry

Posts Tagged ‘codeistry_website’

Portfolio updated

Monday, September 13th, 2010

I’ve just added Twinbro into the Codeistry Portfolio, another job in my queue of jobs that need adding. I’d used the Twinbro website in my Sorfolio, so I thought I’d better put them onto the main portfolio site too.

Screenshots sowing the difference between the two Inkscape Image Supersample settings

I’ve also updated all the thumbnail images in the portfolio, after I figured out which Inkscape setting was degrading the quality. If you go into Inkscape Settings, then Bitmaps and set the ‘Oversample bitmaps’ setting to ’16×16′, you’ll get much nicer anti-aliasing on your bitmaps, especially if you’re rotating or resizing them.

I also took the opportunity to resize the thumbnails to make them a bit larger and to tidy up the formatting of the older ones, which looks much better.

Codeistry now on Sortfolio

Friday, September 10th, 2010

Screenshot of the current Sortfolio page for Vancouver, showing the Codeistry entry, with a 'New' sticker.

I just added Codeistry to Sortfolio, 37Signals portfolio hosting/aggregating thing for web developers. As usual for 37Signals stuff, Sortfolio is very slick, simple and easy to use. The only thing that I didn’t really like is the budget range – it doesn’t really fit my experience:

Sortfolio Budget Ranges: $3,000 and under; $3,000-$10,000; $10,000-$25,000; $25,000-$50,000; Over $50,000Codeistry jobs are significantly more variable than these categories allow; I could really do with a ‘$100 – $10,000′ category. I don’t really want to drive away interesting smaller clients by saying that I only care about jobs that are over $3000, but I also do $10,000 jobs occasionally too. Hmmm…

Anyway, I’ll be updating the Codeistry entry over the next few days, adding more examples and screenshots. I’ll assess things in a couple of weeks and let you know if it works – and if I actually get any leads and new business via Sortfolio.

Bunch of updates to the Codeistry site

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

I’ve made a number of small updates to the Codeistry site today, which I’ve been queuing up on my local version for a while. I’ve made updates and corrections to my Accessibility made simple article, as well as minor updates to the 9 Steps to Improve your Small Business website and SEO for Fun and Profit ones.

Screenshot of MODx metadata field in page editor.I’ve also souped up the metadata that gets output in the page’s code, so that I’m now outputting a meta description tag – this outputs whatever I’ve typed into the page’s Description field in MODx.

Screenshot of the MODx Meta Keywords systemI’ve also started using MODx built in meta keywords system, so some pages now have some keywords set.

A little while age I also added a Creative Commons license to the page footer but forget to mention it on the blog. This means that the site’s content is now actually marked as copright of Codeistry now – which it wasn’t before. As I’ve chosen a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, this also means that anyone can re-use, re-mix, translate or re-purpose any of the stuff on here for whatever they want, provided it’s non-commercial and they credit the original source.

Anyway, here’s the old footer:

Screenshot of the old Codeistry page footer, before the new license

and here’s the new one:

Screenshot of the Codeistry page footer, with the new Creative Commons license

Accessibility article updated

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Screenshot of the About Codeistry page displayed in Lynx, a text-only web browser.Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve updated the Accessibility article on the main Codeistry website. I’ve polished the text a little more and added a section about testing your site’s accessibility using the Lynx text-only web browser. Check it out!

Colour contrast & accessibility

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Zoomed in composite screenshot showing the Codeistry website before and after the contrast tweak.I’ve been playing around with the Codeistry website’s colours, to improve the contrast and accessibility, whilst retaining the same feel.

The changes are subtle but move the site from mostly failing to almost completely passing the contrast and luminosity tests from JucyStudio.

It might seem obvious but going through this process brought home to me how much the perceived contrast of text depends on the background colour behind it. Text that looks fine on the normal page background might have insufficient contrast when used in a footer, link or menu – where the background colours are different.

The changes included changing the body text to use the old heading colour, using a slightly darker colour for headings and links, and a slightly lighter shade for the page footers, to increase the contrast with the footer text.

I actually think that this has helped the design too – not only for accessibility but it also feels stronger, with more impact and weight. I may even revisit this in the future and punch it up a bit more.

Colour contrast testing tools

http://juicystudio.com/article/colour-contrast-analyser-firefox-extension.php

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