For every website design or redesign, we not only afford tremendous efforts in coming up with bolder and more refreshing looks, we also explore how best to make use of new features and technologies to better the user experience. With all the hype going around about Ajax , we knew we had to look at Ajax seriously for our new website revamp. However, being our usual practical selves, we always made sure the use of new cool features, such as Ajax, is justified. Otherwise, the coolest features will still get thrown out the window if we cannot justify that the benefits are well worth the efforts.

So, instead of drowning the entire website in Ajax, we knew we would be better off focusing our efforts on the one section that would make the most sense using Ajax. We immediately saw that our Portfolio section was high on the list of being the most likely candidate to benefit from the Ajax feature. We decided that we could use Ajax to update parts of the Portfolio page without refreshing the entire page. This meant that our visitors will be able to enjoy a more seamless experience while browsing through our sample works. Hovering over the links for the projects, a nice little tooltip appears, drawing information through Ajax to display a thumbnail of the screenshot alongside bite-sized information. Clicking on the links, the larger screenshot and project details get retrieved, again via Ajax, and displayed in the main area. The benefits brought about by Ajax is a much more responsive page than using the traditional method of reloading entire pages.

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We have removed the original content of this post because the designer has finally decided to redesign his client’s site with his own design, even though we have not gotten any apology from the designer for copying our site design in the first place. Our intention in fingering copycats on this blog is never to humiliate the designers. Rather, we hope to make them realise that they cannot get away with simply ripping off someone else’s designs, and that they should respect others’ works and learn to love their own. Getting inspired by someone else’s work is one thing; simply ripping it off is quite another.

We would like to say thank you to sites like Netdiver, Design Snack, Webcreme, CSSMania, CSSVault and many more sites who had featured us on their well respected sites. You guys are kewl!

We have a total of 6970 unique visitors for last week alone. Thus, we have a total of 6970 new people in the world who had visited thepixelage and get to know thepixelage. Yes!

Finally we have a total of 38 people who bookmark our website for inspiration, design, CSS and other usage!

One of the biggest motivation behind this new site design is to make our website more compliant to web standards. And among them, making the site XHTML and CSS compliant are at the top of the list.

Going the CSS way proves to bring along a pack of benefits. First of all, the separation of content and presentation styles meant that we are no longer burdened with nasty “hack-together” codes. All the content and structure get marked up in XHTML while the visual styles and font formatting are left in separate CSS files. On the one hand, this translates to much better way to maintain the website, on the other hand, we open up possibilities to serve up the exact same content and structure in different formats.

A good example would be to view a print preview of our pages. We have not gotten around to working much on those stylesheets, but from the print preview, you will see that certain content (like the navigation menus) of the original page get stripped away from the print version, and the graphical headings get rendered in text form instead. What we have here, at not much extra costs, is a “printer-friendly” website. Gone are the days when we need to have a “printer-friendly” link to dynamically generate pages that were fit for printing. Beyond printing, we can also have stylesheets for mobile devices, so visitors using their smartphones or PDAs will still be able to view the pages, without having to download the big fat graphics that are really targetted at desktop users.

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It is a real big surprise to find out that someone has stolen our design. I don’t know if we should be happy, angry or sad. I mean, it does not only look similar, the background image, the header, the keywords and even the CSS file were the exact same ones ripped from ours!

Exhibit A: Spina Marketing (http://www.spinamarketing.com/index_1.html)
We were informed by our visitors that they have changed their URL to (http://www.spinamarketing.com/index_new.html). Well consider changing the design!

The design they have ripped is our design for our old site:

Exhibit B: http://old.thepixelage.com

While we might get inspired by other people’s designs, simply ripping off others’ works is way too low to go! Much worse when the culprit happens to claim to be a WEB DESIGN COMPANY! If things get too desperate and you sorely need to rip off a design, I’d think at least the smart way is to change parts and filenames. So imagine our horror when the CSS file was still named “thepixelage.css”. Classic. [Update: It seems they have now changed the filename of their CSS file to “spina_style.css”.]

Well, recently Microsoft lost a legal battle with a patent holder about the way IE is going to display objects and embeds in web pages. Those who have Flash, QuickTime and etc on their website suddenly find that their visitors need to activate the plugin before IE start playing them. Especially those who uses Flash for their navigational, their user need to activate the Flash before the navigational work. This is starting to be such a pain but I’ve found a way to solve this problem. To fix the problem, please follow these steps:

1. Just below the last <object> in your HTML page, insert the following Javascript:

   <script type="text/javascript" src="fixit.js"></script>

2. Open a new document in Notepad or your HTML editor, and copy & paste the following content into it:

   theObjects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
for (var i = 0; i < theObjects.length; i++) {
    theObjects[i].outerHTML = theObjects[i].outerHTML;
}

3. Save this file as fixit.js

Thanks to Mix-FX for the solution.

Working on our new website, we got down and dirty with making the site CSS-compliant without using tables for layout. It had been a most interesting experience and opened our eyes to the ins and outs of working with XHTML and CSS, and we are extremely glad to have taken that path. But what’s even cooler is to get recognised and featured on Netdiver for the effort. Thanks Netdiver!

You’d have noticed that we have a new look. We are very excited with this latest update to our website, because apart from the obvious cosmetic upgrade, we have introduced and employed a host of new functionalities and technologies to make the website more informative and easier to use, among them, stuff like Ajax , CSS compliant layout and this brand new blog.

Over the next three posts, I will attempt to talk about these new exciting additions in more details, and highlight what went behind the design process when including them in this new website update. So, do stay tuned.

On top of the new look, we also have a slew of new features to introduce over time, including a client extranet for our customers and an email campaign management web application. We look forward to getting these out the door as soon as we can. We will post up more details as and when they become available, so we can share our excitement with you.

It is time for thepixelage to grow and we are looking for one Solution Sales Personnel and one Web Programmer (see more details ) to join us. If you are young (or young at heart), talented and have the passion to excel in whatever thing you do, do send us your resume.