I found the following site to be helpful… Devzone

consequently it’s not as hard as I thought it would be… and I went through the 1st lesson just like that.

if you know of any other sites that show you how to create anything with PHP code drop me a link.

(FYI comments that link to other sites not related to this post will NOT be approved!)

Xavier F.

Today I went back to editing The Site and added a drop down menu so that I could bring my print page into play. It’s essentially a javascript function that adds additional links to a normal link via a drop down menu. I get most of these javascript snippets from Dynamic Drive which has. tons of stuff.
I really like this site because it’s great resource to find things that make web pages come alive.

In addition to that I cleaned up the background image in photoshop to get rid of some of those spots. So now I’m pretty much done with getting the site on track. With the menus, layout, and the content all set. I can now focus my attention to modifying this WordPress blog. I got alot of reading to do because this is a Content Management System or CMS. Editing the CMS stylesheet can be a little tricky because most of the content that you see in front of you is not embedded in the html file. This is PHP! and it was dynamically generated when you clicked into this blog. The information that you see is stored in a database, some of it came from a CSS and some of it came from a template file.
If you were to look at the actual code of this page as it sits in the server… you would only see a few lines of code and its PHP not HTML. The PHP code gets all the info from other sources and processes it into an HTML web page… this web page. It’s like a chef in a kitchen where it creates “dishes” from various items on the shelf.
And all this happens in real time and is somewhat similar to other sites like Facebook. Facebook is also a CMS site and everything you’ve got on it… the pictures, the settings, your friends page, etc. is stored in a database. It’s webpages are all based on a template. This WordPress blog also uses a template… what I have to do is modify the WordPress template in my blog in order to change it’s look. So I got’s to do some homework.

Yours,

Xavier F.

Okay so after levitating in the afterglow of yesterdays marathon background image and logo transparency lovefest I went back into the CSS to tidy things up with the general layout and design of The Site. First off I changed the presentation of the “enter” button on the splash page to flow more with that badass logo that I’m still drooling over. Giving it that transparent background style with a black border (which turns white as you mouse over it). Then I finagled with the main menus changing it’s color to solid black. Last but not least I knocked the sidebar down to line up with the top edges of the image in the my portfolio page and made it’s border black. Then I tweaked the background transparency of the portfolio links in the sidebar. I’m pretty much going with the black and white scheme for now since it works well with the background image. In the future I may add some color to it just to see how it looks. The beauty of all this is that I did all of these adjustments in the CSS files of the site (not once did I have to open and edit anything in the html files). Next up I will have to add a drop down menu to the main navigation so that I can bring in my print portfolio.

Overall the site, as it is in it’s current state, has a very minimalist yet elegant design that I’m starting to dig.

yours,

Xavier F.

So… I finally found a background image for my website Division X Design. It took me awhile to figure out what I wanted and I must have racked my brains looking for “the image”.  I guess I needed to stop thinking too hard about the idea and just keep my mind open as to what I might find…

So I did find it… a metal surface that is the top of my filing cabinet. I looked at it and thought it could the job. I set up my camera last night and took a few shots. But the lighting was not quite right and some areas where brighter than other areas. It was because of the lamp. I decided to hold off until the next day and use a timed exposure setting on my camera to capture the surface using only the ambient daylight from outside… and that did the trick! I went to photoshop and tweaked the colors to near grayscale because I didn’t like the rust color too much but I wanted emphasize the corrosion and etchings on the metal. Then I imported the image to my webpage and looked at it on the browser… and that is what I wanted. Well almost!

My logo on my homepage just didn’t fit in anymore and I had to figure out a way to make it “fade” into the background somehow.  When I created it initially there was no gradient and then I put one in as I developed my first site.  Now the image with the gradient was not flowing with the page at all. I needed to make the top part of the gradient transparent so that you can see what’s behind it but how??? I know you can do this in photoshop but this was an Illustrator document. So I googled it and found a way to do it here. I had to read it a few times to understand it but still after 4 tries I got the logo to fade to transparency… at least in Illustrator. After saving the image I previewed it on my webpage and alas… it still looked the same! I scratched my head. I tried saving as a .gif and got nowhere… then I went back to the settings in the save for web dialog box and clicked on the option “interlace” (with the caption “download in multiple passes”). I saved it again.
After refreshing the page I got it! Hot Damn!!!

I must have spent about 3 hours from setting up the camera and editing the logo to get the end result… I’m back baby!

Yours,

Xavier F

So I just finished the redesign of my own website Division X Design. This has been something that I’ve been working on since late December. The old site was a good design but for some reason I was not completely satisfied with it. It seemed to be a bit loose so I decided to just redo it.

I think the new layout leaves room for improvement which will come over time. My plan for the site is to make it into a web 2.0 (PHP version) with all the bells and whistles and then of course I’m going to create a flash version of the site. For now the layout is the basic framework of the design. As I continue to brainstorm about it I will incorporate new design elements into the site. I’m also planning to add a background image to the pages to make it look slick.

And then of course I still want to integrate this WordPress blog towards the look and feel of the main site too.

Keep your eye on Division X Design as I will continue to modify it. With each update I will write a bit about it here.

Yours,

Xavier F.