Up until now, I have been hosted at georgiagraphicdesign.com/lydia. However, I recently got lydia-design.com! I am keeping the site the same, the only difference now is that its an easier url to remember.

I have been going through the process of switching my Wordpress files to a new folder, which I have never done before. This is the tutorial I’m using, and it is great so far: Moving Wordpress. Hopefully soon I’ll get back into posting mode again. :)

Filed under: Internships by Lydia
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Here is just a quick post about something I found out after I made my Flash vs. iPhone rant.

There is a new Flash video on my web internship company website. After we discussed my post about Flash vs. iPhone, we got curious and looked up the website on an iPhone, since we hadn’t even thought about how it would handle our new video. It turns out that if you have a background image in the div that the Flash video/banner is in, the iPhone will show that picture instead of the Flash. It didn’t even have an annoying icon or anything like that. It just looked like a normal site. I just thought I would share that because I found it interesting, and it might be helpful information. :)

I also made a neat little Flash intro to the video, you should check it out! (Its not up there now, but it will probably be in a few days).

Filed under: Flash, Internships by Lydia
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Here is more of a discussion than the informational-type posts I usually do.

I made an earlier post about the “right” way to use Flash. I said that Flash should be restricted to small elements on a site (like a slideshow). I also said that all-Flash websites should be avoided unless you really know what you’re doing (as in, you are a professional that is perfect at it) and provide an html only option or don’t have much traffic (unless you don’t mind excluding people who have old computers). The other day I was talking to someone about this, and they brought up the point that the almighty iPhone doesn’t display Flash on websites. This would back up the argument that Flash should never be used on a website at all.

So many people are using their phones these days to surf the internet, so now web developers have to keep this in mind. Because Flash apparently sucks for phones, this means even the most beautiful Flash-based websites should disappear. Perhaps I am biased because I only use my phone for stone age uses like talking, but I don’t think Flash should have to never be used because of the iPhone etc. people.
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Filed under: Flash by Lydia
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I just recently learned how to add a favicon to a site. I know, it’s super easy, I just never paid any attention to those things before. It just so happened a client needed one on a site I’m working on. I know it’s easy to find tutorials, but I’ll go over the steps I did anyway.

First you need the icon, which has to be in an .ico format. You can download the file format for Photoshop (which for some reason doesn’t initially come with it) or just use an online program like this one.

Then you need to put the icon in the correct place. This could be your root directory (usually public_html) for your whole site, one in each folder for other sites you are hosting, in an image folder, or in the theme folder (for Wordpress). I had to experiment with this because I was using a favicon for various situations.
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Filed under: Internships, Web Design by Lydia
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In a recent post about Flash, I basically said that animated GIFs were old-fashioned and bad to use. Recently at my internship, however, I ended up making an animated GIF to put on one of the websites I am working on. I was trying to find a way to make the menu buttons a little more interesting, and I wanted them to do a fancy effect on hover – yet be easy to implement. What I ended up doing was creating a gif background for the buttons that slowly fades from medium grey to a slightly lighter shade. There is no Javascript or Flash involved. I simply used the gif as the hover background in the CSS of the page. And because the GIF only plays once, the user only sees a brief fading effect.

If you want to see what it looks like, go here. (caution! site is still under construction)

I’m sure there also also many other clever ways to use animated GIFs. In the future, I’m going watch out for opportunities to use it again. But seriously, no dancing leprechauns or anything like that. :)

Filed under: Internships, Web Design by Lydia
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