web design

I just gave my last talk this Sunday morning at the DrupalCampLA conference. The talk brushed on elements that contribute to effective designs for social networking websites. It's heavily inspired by Joshua Porter's new book Designing for the Social Web, and includes insight on which Drupal modules help support user participation. I also cover my own personal Drupal case study, P=MD, a social networking site made for my friends; with that experience, I learned that recruiting and retaining users is a huge challenge and requires an additional marketing/publicity mindset (beyond design and development) and I learned that all these modules in Drupal provide amazing functionality but it takes additional effort to make them all work together into a coherent, usable website.

The presentation files are here in PDF form and includes bonus slides on (1) how to promote the sharing of with your website as a viral marketing tool, and (2) what modules can harbor the collective intelligence of your crowds (your site visitors). I can upload a Powerpoint or Keynote file if you e-mail me.

I had a wonderful time speaking and I loved meeting new friends in the audience. I hope I can help out again with DrupalCamp and other Drupal promotions in the future, because this was such a valuable experience for me. :) read more→

I ended up fixing the quirkiness with Carolen's suggestions and investigations into PNG issues. It seems Internet Explorer chokes if you don't specify a color under the CSS shorthand property "background":

background: url(IMAGEFILE) <color> <repeat> <position>;


After adding those in, and then tweaking the code a little bit so that the masthead was in a more manageable div area, my front page's backgrounds display quite well in Internet Explorer 6. I'm hoping Internet Explorer 7 will be easier to work with. read more→

I have to test out my website quickly on Internet Explorer for Windows on campus machines (since I use a Mac). This is what my page is supposed to look like:

But under IE, a lot of things go missing:

My head is gone!

I've also noticed some really weird mouse-hover behavior with Internet Explorer 6. I'll have to research this some more. read more→

I'm still working and working on molding this site into something that's content-rich, and something that's worth visiting. The front page is sorely lacking — it doesn't even match the rest of the website's themes — but I have a good idea of what to create. To the top, I'll put an introduction to myself and what the website is about. To the left, I'll place a single highlighted feature post, and the most recently-updated posts (whether they be blog or publication or image). To the right, I'll put randomly-selected "selections" from the portfolio, and the portfolio index itself. Still in Photoshop mock-up stage; I'll need to code in the PHP. read more→