FINISHED!

I'm finished. Finished with my new site, and finished with this blog. If you'd like to say a few words in mourning, now is the time. Really, the blog is just moving to a new location. To pick up right where you left off, just go to my site (www.zachwoomer.com). Hope to hear from you there! Read this post >>

5 Awsomely Awesome Resource Sites

Here's 5 sites I visit every day. These 5 sites hold all the resources and information you can cram into that 3 to 4 pound head of yours.



1. w3schools


I'll start off with the most useful. This is essentially the site I used to learn how to build websites. It has on it information and tutorials on pretty much every kind of code there is. If you ever felt the need to learn programming so you can hack in, reprogram a spaceship and use it to pick up girls and joyride to the moon, this is where you'd go to do it. The best part by far is the interactive online demos you can mess with that show you exactly what the code does you're trying to learn. It really gets me hot and bothered.


2. Fudgegraphics | For Lovers


Looking for free photoshop brushes or textures and a sexy good time? This is the place to go. It may be because this site perfectly reflects the style I like to work in, but I feel Fudgegraphics has some of the best quality brushes and textures you can find, hands down and ass up. Not to mention some of the other content, such as the featured artists, gives for some excellent inspiration.


3. Smashing Magazine


This site really covers a lot of bases, which is why I like it so much. It covers different web trends and practices used today, tutorials, freebies (textures and what not), and ideas to help your work go smoother and more efficiently. It's the all in one, swiss army knife of design blogs.


4. Web Designer Wall


I mainly go to this site for inspiration, because it features a wide variety of sites, all the time. From minimal to text heavy, all sorts. But it also has some interesting articles now and again as well. All and all it's a nice little fun fest, and the person that runs it (Nick La) has some other great sites as well.


5. DesignM.ag


I use this site mainly for textures and some sweet ass photoshop actions. And I mean sweet. Cross processing? Forgetaboutit. It also has designer interviews which is how I stumbled across Fudgegraphics. Thank the lord. This site really is a masterful thing, full of inspiration, free design tools and some straight up magic. Be amazed.


Bonus: FFFFound


Ever find yourself in a rut trying to come up with a url? Just keep repeating the first letter until it shows up as available. This site is effing awesome. And I'm not talking "seeing some dolphins by your boat when your sea fishing" awesome, I'm talking "the Battlestar Galactica picking you up at your home and taking you to Ruby Tuesdays where you'll do shots with Katee Sackhoff" awesome. This site is so full of inspiration, I can't even stand it. I truly believe too much of it will give you cancer. Basically, this is a site that you become a member of, then whenever you come across something on the web that looks cool you add it to this site and tag it according to the content. A site devoted to things that people think look cool is pretty much the best inspiration you're going to get.


And there you have it.

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Firefox Add-ons That are Sweet as Hell

The browser that I use on a daily basis is Firefox. In my opinion Firefox is one of the leading browsers out there today. Not only for the fact they handle web standards like a sexy dream, but they have some of the sweetest wed development add-ons I've ever laid my innocent eyes on.



1. Web Developer Toolbar

This add-on is by far the most useful. There are so many things you can do with it that I haven't even explored yet. What I use it for is a learning tool of sorts. When I come across a site that I'm curious as to how the designer accomplished a certain effect, I use this toolbar to check out the css file. Or I use the toolbar to outline frames to figure out layout problems. Just the multitude of useful things this toolbar does is like a 60 year old hooker, you know she's been around the block and you'll definitely get your moneys worth. Except in this case, it would be like a 60 year old hooker that costs nothing.

2. ColorZilla

This is a handy little tool that gives you the hex value of any color you see on a web page. Like that pretty orange color you see on that pornographic site you visit in the mornings before work, you can now easily copy the hex value of that color and implement it into your own pornographic sites. It also helps when your testing your own sites and you would like a text to be the same color as the banner at the top of your page, you can easily get it this way in a jiffy, instead of having to open up the photoshop file, wait for it to load, and wanting to end your life.

3. Screengrab!

This is one of my favorites. While building my own website, I wanted to have nice screen shots of the different sites that I had built. Instead of taking a screen shot and having the bottom of a site cut off, or having to scroll down to take another screen shot so I could piece them together, this sweet sweet add-on allowed me to either get a copy of or save a shot of the entire window. Yes, be amazed at the power of this add-on and the amazing abilities of my run-on sentences. You could also get a shot of just the viewable part of the window if you so desire, but I mainly use it for whole window shots.


So that's it. These are add-ons I have for Firefox that I use on a daily basis and they make a few parts of my job just that much easier. If anything, get the Web Developer Toolbar. I've learned so much with just that tool alone. It taught me how to be a man, and enlightened me to some of the finer points in life. But the others are definitely a great help as well. These three add-ons should be gotten as a package, because I assure you'll find good use of all of them at one point or another. The Ninja Turtles wouldn't be so good if Raphael was the only one. It would be The Ninja Turtle, and he would probably get his ass beat all the time, and live at home in his mother's basement until his late 60's.


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Spicy Web Designers

I was just interviewed for this spicy site.


Luc Arnold of Spicy Web Designers recently contacted me about an interview, and I obliged. (Check it out!) The site is great and it's chockablock full of interviews by professional and up and coming web designers. It's a really inspiring place, and you get to see a little background of some very interesting people. Can you dig it?

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Sitemap = Sex

**UPDATE - View the site here.

I recently read an article on sitemaps and found it quite arousing. I was then asked to build a new site for Harbortouch, geared for their independent sales offices.



As I was so inspired by the sitemap article I had just read, I decided to take that approach. This was literally the only design I made for it and right away it was a go. I'm actually completely finished with the site but it has to get it's final approval from the higher ups before it can go live. That's besides the point, I've discovered that doing sitemaps in this fashion is pretty much the sexiest thing a man/woman/manwo can do. It's good for a multitude of reasons; SEO, easy navigation, sexy aesthetics, and the list goes on. I just wish I had started doing sites this way sooner. Either way, this was the first one, and I'm completely happy with it. Once it's live I'll throw the link on here. It's weird though how much I overlooked this before. There are so many sweet ass sites I visit almost daily that have a sitemap in this fashion(Zooppa, The Book Cover Archive, DesignM.ag, Apple, Firefox, etc.), going to show that beautiful things attract beautiful, vain people. It's really a great tool for good design and awesome for SEO. It gives a detailed list of links to every page of your site on every page of your site. That way no matter what page of your site gets crawled by a search engine, your whole site will be accessible from that page. Boing. So, this is definitely something you should incorporate in all sites you create if the content allows. It's definitely something that will be present on my next site re-design. You can bet your ass and half a glass of Vladimir Vodka.

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The Antonelli Institute

So I mentioned in a previous post that I sort of had something in the works. Allow me to elaborate.


One of my professors from college, Ed Zawora, emailed me a few months ago about forming a sort of group for all the Antonelli graduates who have won best portfolio. Since then I've gotten very involved in web design. I proposed an idea to him a few weeks ago that we should build a website that showcases selected works from the most recent winner and all past winners. He thought it was a great idea, so I got to designin' that ish. Well, now I'm finished with it. I have it up on my site for Ed to review and give me whatever changes he feels is necessary, and it's pretty much up to him to get together all the previous years works so I can just plug all that into the site. Anyway, keeping with the idea that two heads are better than one, I'd like you to go check out my mock up. Let me know what you think, likes or dislikes. So far I'm really the only one who's seen it so there's possibly a lot of things I might have looked over, and a fresh set of eyes would be nice. So, go ahead and give me some damn feedback.


Antonelli Institute Best Portfolio Gallery

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Tricias New Site - Take 2

**UPDATE - Her site is done, check it out!

Well, in redesigning her site I started off with her new logo, since that would pretty much determine the branding for her whole site (as far as color, feel, etc.). You could compare the idea to someone's eye color, which sometimes determines a person's entire outfit. And now that I got that terrible analogy out of the way, turns out she didn't pick any of the logos I presented in the previous post. I did a couple more right after I did that post and she went with one of those tasty bundles. Again, as I said in the previous post she wanted her logo to be pretty simple and text oriented, that hasn't changed. But, I pushed for it to have a little more graphic element to it just to make it more interesting, and more recognizable I guess. This is what was decided on.





I tried this idea a few different ways before this one was decided on. I used a couple different fonts for her initials, I tried it with and without the word photography. But, she wanted "photography" to stay so there it is, and it's growing on me I guess. Either way, for some things you could still take away the "photography" anyways (like for stationary) to make it cleaner. She also initially wanted it to just be black and white. I added in the color and started with the convincing. I don't know, I just again wanted to opt for something a little more memorable. I went with the color I did because it's a color she likes and would be comfortable with, therefore would be more easily convinced. Plus I didn't really want to go with a color that's obnoxious or really bold because I don't want her to come off as unprofessional or an amateur. I'm actually really happy with how it turned out so it's all good. Sooo, after that was all settled, then it was on to the site designin.' She wasted no time with this one. The very first design I did she liked. I didn't really get to explore but that's alright. The first design I do is usually how I really want something to look, then every other design is just different versions of that first design. Unless of course the client wants to go in a whole different direction, then it's back to the drawing board. At this point, the site's actually almost finished. I have the mock-up of it here for your viewing McPleasure. It's just a taste, a tasty tasty taste.


So there you have it. I'm too tired to continue writing so go ahead and take all this in, so deep. Let me know what you think. It's easy, you press the comment button then lay your fingers on your "home row." Then proceed to type in an "I know how to type on my keyboard" type fashion. So then, maybe we could converse about my ideas I've presented here like normal humans, because feedback is key. Good talk.

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fin-ish [verb] 1. bring (a task or activity) to an end; complete

So I just got finished redoing my girlfriend Tricia's photography site, with exception of whatever changes she wants, but it's at least functional. I learned quite a bit making this ish and also probably need glasses now from staring at my screen for 6 hours straight (my eyes are bleeding). I learned how to make a fisheye menu, a horizontal scrolling div (even though this one cost money which is some bull), an image switcher, and finally how to preload images using just css, which is the tits (pronounced "teets" like on a cow). You just call the image at the bottom of the code and make a class that has visibility:hidden. It will cache the image on the visitors computer for whenever it's needed later. All in all the whole thing was a bowl of seduction. Go check it out, let your eyes slowly roll over it like a supple woman wrapped in a bearskin rug waiting for you to get home from a long hard days work. Read this post >>