by bryan chalker | Feb 17, 2014 | Website |
Are you a Christian web designer? One whose primary role is church web design or faith-focused design? I’m not sure about your situation, but for me – I didn’t start learning web design to become the next Jeffrey Zeldman (the first web guy I was in awe of. A geek’s rock star). I started it as a hobby. I always loved messing with my Commodore64 and TI-99, and when I heard of “html”, well, I had to check it out. Sitting at work one day, I read pages of “learning html” on one of the countless sites that gave free webspace to anyone. I was giddy at my first attempt…an embedded spinning globe animated .gif, stuck on a page of glittering stars. Beautiful. Not the look, but the potential. I was hooked. I knew what I wanted to spend time learning and developing. But I no idea how to implement what I was learning about, in my everyday life. One minute backstory – when I was 19, I felt a specific calling in my life to enter into “full-time” ministry. It was a clear and powerful call. God would be using my skills and talents for his purpose. I spent the next 10 years praying and seeking where I would be used. Preacher? Teacher? Missionary? I never felt a peace about any of that, though the importance of each was always apparent. Fast-forward to around early 2000. I was asked by my supervisor at MediaOne (a regional cable/isp that I worked at in Jacksonville), based on my new found interest in web code, to help him develop an intranet site...
by bryan chalker | Feb 10, 2014 | Website |
I love designing web pages and web sites. It’s a wonderful process that involves wrapping the latest technologies together with creative ideas and design. Who doesn’t love that combination. Well apparently Microsoft, Google, and the rest of the motley bunch of email client creators. The are firmly “stuck in the 90s”. You need to lobotomize your web approach, to remove all those pesky standards that guide your web designs. Things to know when you design email templates: Designing email “templates” are not the same as designing web pages. If they are, then you need to seriously adjust how you design web pages. Initial web pages, all through the 1990’s, and early 2000’s were designed using “<table>” elements to layout the content. Then design evolved, and tables were looked at with disdain – as developers understood they should only hold tabular data, and not be used for layouts. Now, proper websites and pages are developed using “<div>” elements to lay them out, and for HTML5 use, the “<section>“, “<header>“, and “<menu>” tags. That’s why, to design the proper and consistent email template, you gotta kick it old school. “Tables are your best friend” (pardon me…I have to wash my mouth out with soap for a moment. Ok. Back). The reason I say this, is that tables are what you must use to contain your layout. It is not yet an option. To keep the look of a template you simply have to do this. Tables are not the only thing differentiating email code from web code. Desktop email clients such as Microsoft Outlook and even online clients such as GMail or...
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