Website Design Liskeard

Transparent boxes are becoming a common element to many new designs, as you will see our latest design is build around the design of 2 transparent boxes however this was done using png’s.

There are a number of ways to achieve this effect but today i will show a simple example of how to achieve this using CSS. I am not certain to what extent this code will work on all browsers but any feedback that you might have please let me know as i will include it in this post.

The below example will show a box using the background colour of white and an alpha of 50%.

Transparent Box CSS

#mydiv {
width: 300px;
height: 50px;
margin: 20px 0;
background-color: #ffff00;
/* Internet Explorer */
filter:alpha(opacity=60);
/* CSS3 standard */
opacity:0.6;
}

Here’s what it looks like

50%

30%

10%

Advantages

The only real advantage, but a good one, is that you no longer need to use images (e.g. pngs) for your backgrounds which could result in faster loading times for your web page.

Disadvantages

This may not work on all browsers, it certainly does for the most recent versions but how far back this technique goes back I’m not too sure. Using the code above you will also need to keep the width set, in IE it seems to break without it. But im sure there is a work around for this.

Today we launched the all new website for the new Falcon Ridge development, a unique development of 15 contemporary lodges at the old Dobwalls Adventure Park site.

The lodge features include:

• Double glazing
• Floor to ceiling windows in the lounge and bedrooms
• Solid timber cladding
• Flat screen TV
• Fully fitted kitchen
• Beautiful bathroom suite
• En-suite master bedroom
• Engineered oak plank flooring
• Recessed halogen lighting
• Stainless steel electrical sockets
• Architectural detailing
• Unique contemporary style
• Wonderful decking area creating the perfect link between outside and in.

Falcon Ridge is an exclusive and unique development of 15 luxury holiday homes, marrying beautiful quality and contemporary styling with a truly wonderful and natural setting. Offering contemporary living in a magnificent location, each home at Falcon Ridge is nestled within its own landscaped and spacious plot each with its own wonderful outlook – a truly perfect environment in which to relax, unwind and breathe.

The two bedroom homes at Falcon Ridge reflect the wonderfully natural setting in which they exist. Extensively built from timber harvested from sustainable forests – still the most beautiful building material available - before being blended with contemporary styling and state of the art appliances.

Click here to launch the website

lodges for sale, holiday lodges for sale, residential holiday homes for sale, holiday lodges for sale cornwall, beach holiday lodges for sale

Using the php include(); statment can be a handy way to speed up your development time , making it easier to amend or add features to a set template or snippet of code.

I have uploaded a zip file with an example of a few include statements. This can be found at the bottom of this post.

Example Code

<?php include("includes/filename.php"); ?>

Take a look at the attached example and see how you can use the php include function to speed up your development time.

Things to note

Unless your machine is set up to allow php files to run locally you will need to upload it to your server to test.

Download

PHP Include Example Download

Yes thats correct, another css hack for i.e 6 this time it’s ‘min-height’. As some of you are probably aware i.e 7 now supports the ‘min-height’ css property making our lives much simpler, or rather even more complicated as we have to create hacks or work arounds for old browsers such as i.e 6. 

Show below i have included the css for creating a div element with a minimum height, of course this could be applied to any element of your html document. For the div example that i am showing, this method is incredibly usefull when you have content that does not fill a specified area on your webpage. By using the min-height property you will effectivley allow your div to scale and expand but the hight will go no lower than the specified pixel size (e.g. 200px).

What you will see below is the basics of getting your div to display correctly on nearly all browsers (I haven’t managed to find any that dont support this method).

Example of min-height code

mydivname {
  min-height:200px;
  height:auto !important;
  height:200px;
}

Try it out and see how easy it is to use.

It might not sound a big deal but the new site got an editors pick on w3csites.com yesterday. Featuring on the homepage and the sites page. I only stumbled across it when looking at my analytics account when i was quite confused as to why i had so many hits in such a short period of time.

Look out for some new designs coming soon for my most recent clients!

Some new ones to come include.

• Kayaking southwest website launch (complete website and forum).
• Falcon Ridge Lodges in Cornwall
• Sara Sherwood new website design

Watch this space.

Changing the right click menu in flash files is relitivley simple. Using the code below and placing it on the root of your document you can add a new right click menu to your published files. This disables the existing zoom in, zoom out ect and enables you to attach functions to the buttons, whether it be launching a new web page or changing the colour of the movie clip document.

So heres what to do:

Paste the following code onto the root of your flash document, directly onto a blank frame, publish your movie, Job done!

And heres the code:

//define any functions to included on a menu item
function launchsite1(){
getURL("http://www.minimalistics.co.uk", _blank);
}

////Declare a new menu item
newmenu = new ContextMenu();//Hide the built in flash menu
newmenu.hideBuiltInItems();//define your new menu items
item1 = new ContextMenuItem("My Home Page", launchsite1);
item2 = new ContextMenuItem("Another Web Page", launchsite2);
newmenu.customItems.push(item1);
newmenu.customItems.push(item2);//Build New Menu
_root.menu = newmenu;

You can change add or remove any of the items above to suit your requirements.

So the new website has been launched for Dobwalls Adventure Park, marking a new era for the park and the future of it’s development.

The new design now includes detailed information regarding the recent closure and development plans for 15 contemporary lodges and a £5.5 million pound culture centre.

Created in XHTML and CSS.

Take a look at www.dobwalls.com

The Readymade Generator – Alan Bourne – 273616 – iDAT203 – Conceptual Art

The beginning
Initially this project started life tackling the idea of concepts and the methods and approaches with which we come up with concepts. The direction in which I approached this idea was by developing ideas and prototypes to understand how we create concepts, and more importantly what is a good concept? To try to answer this problem I set myself the challenge of designing a concept generator. This would hopefully benefit me and help tackle the question to provide a concept for me to work with. After only 2 weeks developing the generator my ideas and concept shifted.

The concept generator has evolved into the Readymade Generator which is presented to you today. It can be argued that the concept generator did the job exactly as that it was designed for. From the initial concept generator prototype the readymade generator was born.

Concept
My concept is now clear and it challenges the use of online sources to create user generated readymade art. If a readymade is “an object manufactured for some other purpose, presented by an artist as a work of art” (Readymades no date) why can’t that object be from an online source?
The main idea and workings behind the Readymade Generator is to claim objects from the internet (such as images or text) and then allow an artist to rearrange the design and layout, giving the objects new meaning.

The images produced by the Readymade Generator in collaboration with the user or ‘Artist’ raise the same point as Marcel Duchamp did with his Readymades. The generated images can “be seen as a sort of irony to defining art itself, because the images say here it is, a thing that I call art, I didn’t even make it myself” (Ades et al.1999; 151).

The produced work is determined by the artist, he or she must set down the rules of the content by specifying the keywords on which the system performs its searches.

When all of the objects have been loaded into the system the user must then decide which objects should be included in the final piece. Image and text choices have to be made and layout and position of the objects are also factors that the artist must also decide. These are the processes any artist must make whether the work is of a digital or physical nature.

The artist then has the choice or deciding to include their work in the online gallery, or to discard the work entirely. The images in the gallery have been previously uploaded by other artists, these artworks and images produced from the Readymade generator are products of the artist.

By including an online art work gallery artists can submit their work, this is included for a reason. Like many artists not all of their work is displayed in galleries, some artists work gets left behind, forgotten about or the artist is just not happy with the work. By allowing users to upload their work they are saying that the work is complete, finished or done with. This is also true for the inclusion of an artist signature which the artist must make the choice to sign the work.

The images may seem meaningless and of an unaesthetic nature, however this is the exact point that the project is trying to create. The produced images are designed to take the meaning of the existing images and text out of context, to give them a new meaning.

Technical implementation
The system has been created in Adobe Flash making it accessible to all users who have the internet or access to a PC/Mac. By using a number of current technologies the system semantically pulls information from the web depending on user keyword searches. The information and data is displayed using Actionscript 2 scripting making the system dynamic and ever changing, this also allows user interaction with the retrieved objects, which in turn results in some freedom of expression for the individual artist and creates difference in the resulting piece. PHP coding is also used to obtain website html code which is later used in the application for data filtering and dynamic display. The scripts website location is determined by the system rules and user keywords. This information then builds a URL for the PHP code to rip.

Currently the system uses three online sources for its content. Google was decided on early in the project development stage as research showed that its image results are one of the best, this also provides advanced image search results which are retrieved and dynamically loaded. By using Google image search the system is able to claim resources from the entire web. Based on keyword search relevancy, images are pulled from Google and displayed in a random fashion. Their layer hierarchy when stacked, is based on there position in Google’s search page, so the more relevant images appear much clearer. As Google rescans content on a regular basis the position of the images will change, this also allows for expansion of the project as new images appear online and are scanned by Google, they too can be included.

English Wikipedia pages have also been integrated as part of the search, if the precise words are entered correctly; content from Wikipedia is loaded into the title area and the scrollable text box area. The reason Wikipedia was used for this content is its Web 2 properties, the content is ever changing and this allows expansion for the project, as the site develops more and more information will be retrieved. Questions have been raised regarding Web 2 and its validity of information but for the purpose of this project the meaning of the text is irrelevant the content is what counts.

Finally the last resource that has been included is Artistquotes.net, this has been implemented to include famous artist quotes, this is highly dependant on keyword searches but returns a number of relevant results when the correct names are used.

Evaluation
I believe that the system I have created backs up all of the research and theory behind the concept and design. As discussed earlier it has been designed with the idea of expansion in mind, by using the ever-growing online sources the possibilities are infinite. At present the system is still very limited as Artists Quotes and Wikipedia results require accurate user input but due to the time constraints this is something that had to be over looked slightly. In the future I see the system implementing voice recognition, this could also be linked up to music to generate the readymade artwork.

Bibliography
Ades, D., Cox, N. & Hopkins, D. (1999), Marcel Duchamp, Thames and Hudson, London. Godfrey, T. (1998), Conceptual Art, Phaidon Press Limited, London. Paul, C. (2003), Digital Art, Thames and Hudson, London. Stallabrass, J. (2003), Internet Art , Tate Publishing, London. Wood, P. (2002), Movements in Modern Art - Conceptual Art, Tate Publishing, London.

Webography
Readymades (no date) [online] Available: http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/r/readymade.html [date accessed: 08 April 2007]

I was looking into some more artist who use the internet as a medium. Heath Bunting plays with internet structure, his wesite (listed below) contains a page called _readme.html this consists of an extract from the magazine “Wired” about the artist himself.
The purpose of the piece is to challenge the notions that as a suser of the web we are constantly faced with pages with the odd link here or there linking to certain important keywords, this does the reverse. It hyperlinks everything that seems not to be important, these links for example might be on the text “does” this then links to www.does.com.

http://www.irational.org/heath/_readme.html

After reading many chapters from “Internet Art - The online clash of culture and commerce” by Julian Stallabrass i found many examples, but these cease to exist online anymore.

Some named artists that i was able to research from this included the following:

• Heath Bunting
• Alexei Shulgin
• Maciej Wisniewski
• Ola Pehrson
• and more

The project has really come on since last week, all of the tweaking parts have been done to make the system reliable and completed. I have now updated the user uploads section with a new layout to keep in style with the readymade generator.

Image gallery template now complete: 

The flash file now includes 2 tutorial help sections for new users to help them understand what each section does, and how to make the most out of the search box.

One section is an illustrative part where each section is described in full, detailing each component (See below).

The other section contains 2 videos, one showing users how to perofm a search, the other detailing how to upload files to the online gallery.