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Copyright © 2011 Bianca Gubalke. Visit the original article at http://biancagubalke.com/web-design-news/slidedeck-and-rss-feeds/.

SlideDeck and RSS Feeds

WOW! Yesterday’s experiment created quite some chaos . . . and brought up the topic of  “SlideDeck and RSS Feeds”! Here I was in for a surprise…

SlideDeck and RSS Feeds

From a Website Development point of view, the SlideDeck can be integrated into the header, the sidebar widget or into a post in various attractive styles – that can even be customized. The big advantage versus our Flash based earlier sliders (which I really liked….) : Flash cannot be seen on mobile phones, this SlideDeck can. After going mobile with our Author Blogs, the rest simply had to follow… therefore our sliders had to be adapted, they had to change.

I fancied the idea of having an elegant SlideDeck in a post – being the ideal carrier for a message and advertising. Especially after the fantastic result I had with my first slider, that fitted much better into the post than into the header, especially when eliminating the spines. This sparked the idea of using a slider as a communication vehicle.

I never thought of possible conflicts when it comes to the SlideDeck and RSS Feeds!

SlideDeck Conflicts

One just never knows unless one experiments… and while the attractive SlideDeck Accordion I created for marketing Monkey Valley Resort looked great on my Author Blog, little did I know what the feed streams would do with it! Well – they had a party!

To keep it short: the lesson here is definitely to stay away from using this slider within posts as the SlideDeck and RSS Feeds simply cause havoc when syndicated by others, especially if the pictures used were full-width and not the usual 460 px I stick to normally. As the receiving blog does not have the necessary software or program installed, the code is destroyed – resulting in the slider breaking up into individual pictures and videos that dont respect the borders set for blogs, meaning they extend or flow into whatever space they can get into, sometimes even with a cascading effect.

Having discovered this pretty fast on http://mynoordhoek.com – where I actually still run a beautiful Flash accordion – and then on http://touchvisiontalk.com – I quickly went to take out all SlideDecks I had inserted into posts, starting with the one that so impressed me at Saturday’s Ycademy Seminar session. For the time being, and until there is a magyc trick coming my way, I stick to the header area.

Lesson learnt – no need for anyone to repeat it!

 

Copyright © 2011 Bianca Gubalke. Visit the original article at http://biancagubalke.com/media-marketing/slidedeck-for-monkey-valley-resort/.

SlideDeck for Monkey Valley Resort

In preparation for the brand-new website planned for monkeyvalleyresort.com, and keeping to the branding elements on the website I developed for Monkey Valley on Semiomantics Evolution HERE, I am testing the first SlideDeck for Monkey valley Resort.

SlideDeck for Monkey Valley Resort

In my experiment regarding the SlideDeck for Monkey Valley Resort yesterday, I had chosen Slide 1 for Accommodation followed by Slide 2 for Conferencing, which is heavily marketed, especially to the Corporate World.

I was very curious to see how the YouTube Video will integrate on slide 3: Entertainment.

Slide 4 is about Weddings… followed by Slide 5 about the Thorfynn’s Restaurant.

 

Let’s see what we get :)

The Partridge

It’s not often that I’ve seen a partridge just wandering free and in search food. Yesterday I had a nice surpise when I  looked out of the window, a partridge just wandering about foraging for food. This bird is easily recognized by its red beak and red marking round the eye and its plumpness resembling a chicken, for this reason its a favourite with the game hunters and found in local butchers when in season.

We are of course more familiar with the partridge in a favourite Christmas song, “The Twelve days of Chrstmas” ….’ on the 1st Day of Christmas my true love gave to me….a Partridge in a Pear Tree.”

Photos shot with my good old Nikon P90.

Creating a Favicon

As I have a brand new Semiomantics X0 3.1 script installed on my personal blog I  have made a decision to also alter the look of my web site. The site will no longer display the flash slider, which is not smartphone friendly, but instead will display the SlideDeck Pro which is  not only clearly visible on any mobile device like an ipad or iphone but also includes touchscreen interaction, cool eh?

One of the features when customising a  website is creating a favicon which displays in a brower next to your website name. Both .jpg and .gif formats are accepted these days by most browsers however, to be visible on the IE browser you still need the .ico format.

You can create an image that you wish to display and then use a favicon generator to change the format to .ico or you can now create an image in Photoshop and there save it as .ico after having installed the neccessary plug-in. Both ways work perfectly well.

Creating a favicon image in Photoshop

I started creating my favicon image in Adobe Photoshop CS4, working on a larger canvas than neccessary, 256×256, (this way you can see better exactly what you are doing) and a larger size of the image is always useful to have. The first step was to create the background. A plain colour I prefer as in the end result any intricate background will not show successfully. The next layer was for the text/logo in this case just a simple ‘z’ in the same font as I use on my website.

You will notice that the English font  use in my sites header is a thin font and when resized to 16×16, favicon size, the end result is not satisfactory. The font to be used for the purpose of a favicon must be bolder and more solid in order to be clearly visible in a browser when resized. The other font that I use on my website is Georgia, and when this was applied the end result was more pleasing and acceptable. However, still not totally the desired effect I was after.

Back to Photoshop. This time I changed the colour scheme around, light background, dark text. When resized it looks good in the browser. So now the next  step is to save the resized 16×16 image as a favicon.ico which I can now do after having installed the photoshop plugin. The very last step is to save my work as a .psd for future reference.

Step 1 of the new look for zonicholas.com accomplished. Next step an apple touch icon. More to come…

Copyright © 2011 Bianca Gubalke. Visit the original article at http://biancagubalke.com/online-communication/slidedeck-experiments/.

SlideDeck Experiments

Following this weekend’s Ycademy Seminar, I am doing some SlideDeck Experiments to see what would suit some of my customers best.

These SlideDecks are perfect Message Boards, meaning ideal for Online Communication and Advertising. Whoever has a Product or Service to sell: display it on the SlideDeck and there is no way your readers will miss it – provided it’s attractive and enjoyable!

Slide Deck Experiments Accordion Style

In these SlideDeck Experiments in Accordion Style we need to calculate a fair amount of distorsion of the images, graphics and fonts – depending on the style we choose it is more or less.

 

The above example I like very much in terms of design – especially as it also picks up my colours – however, the columns do take a lot of space and the images are distorted vertically. Not ideal!

Here’s another example:

 

The color does not match my website branding, so it needs to be styled differently… if I would choose it.

Here a last version for today… probably the best solution for me in terms of accordion style because the columns take up the least space so far:

 

Ideally, I would want a slider without any decoration – as I had before. This probably needs some customization that we may learn in one of the future Ycademy workshops.

Copyright © 2011 Bianca Gubalke. Visit the original article at http://biancagubalke.com/online-communication/slidedeck-experiments/.

SlideDeck Experiments

Following this weekend’s Ycademy Seminar, I am doing some SlideDeck Experiments to see what would suit some of my customers best.

These SlideDecks are perfect Message Boards, meaning ideal for Online Communication and Advertising. Whoever has a Product or Service to sell: display it on the SlideDeck and there is no way your readers will miss it – provided it’s attractive and enjoyable!

Slide Deck Experiments Accordion Style

In these SlideDeck Experiments in Accordion Style we need to calculate a fair amount of distorsion of the images, graphics and fonts – depending on the style we choose it is more or less.

 

The above example I like very much in terms of design – especially as it also picks up my colours – however, the columns do take a lot of space and the images are distorted vertically. Not ideal!

Here’s another example:

 

The color does not match my website branding, so it needs to be styled differently… if I would choose it.

Here a last version for today… probably the best solution for me in terms of accordion style because the columns take up the least space so far:

 

Ideally, I would want a slider without any decoration – as I had before. This probably needs some customization that we may learn in one of the future Ycademy workshops.

Copyright © 2011 Bianca Gubalke. Visit the original article at http://biancagubalke.com/media-marketing/website-slider/.

Website Slider

Following yesterday’s fantastic Ycademy Seminar on integrating new Media Design Frameworks into our Author Blog to boost our performance in terms of Media Design and Media Marketing, here is a first Website Slider test from my memory…

Website Slider

Important when integrating a slider into a post is to set a featured image… at least on Semiomantics XO :)

Now let’s see what this gives us…

Copyright © 2011 Bianca Gubalke. Visit the original article at http://biancagubalke.com/ycademy-seminars/photo-and-slides/.

Photo and Slides

 

Copyright © 2011 Bianca Gubalke. Visit the original article at http://biancagubalke.com/ycademy-seminars/logo-design/.

Logo Design

Yesterday, I posted an article under “Icon Design” – which could just as well have been under “Logo Design” … as in fact it featured the Apple Touch Icon with the Logo I had developed for Magnetic Transport Surplus.

The reason for the exercise was to create an additional image for the new Slider based on the dimensions I would need for my own Author Blog. I have a clear vision of what I need there and in which dimension.

Interestingly, it fitted perfectly into the current Slider built into the script Semiomantics XO 3.1.

 

 

Logo Design presented on a Slider

However, as we heard in last night’s pre-seminar call, there will be a sort of accordion setup in a clearly defined format – which is always a great alternative for our customers to feature different chapters on their blogs, and I created one a while ago on MyNoordhoek.com HERE.

However, from the dimensions I see on the example provided, these are completely different again!

Size matters… and with it proportions and refined details created specifically for a certain format have to be redefined.

I therefore played with my Logo Design presented on a Slider and, while keeping to my branding elements in terms of color and fonts, we have a different image.

Interestingly, it does not display as well in the current slider built into the Semiomantics XO 3.1 script – being too wide… one can easily compare both on the slider right now. We will see later how it looks in the exciting new SliderDeck we will be working with.

 

Ycademy Seminar March 2011

Let’s see what eventually transpires at the Ycademy Seminar March 2011, starting within a few hours from now.