I will be taking in the sites and sounds of the @media 2008 conference on the 29th and 30th of May.

I’ve also made a few minor fixes to the Circa82 site in IE5.

Three new projects have been added to the site:

• DPR Website
• DPR’s Mortgage Bench Web Application
• Primhe Website

The John Wiley & Sons project has been added to the site. The project involved the conversion of a large number of HTML Journal Extracts into compliant W3C HTML 4.0 Transitional.

Whenever I am available on Skype you’ll see a small icon saying “I’m online” above the gnome (as show below).

Please click this icon to have a chat with myself about any queries you have. If you haven’t got Skype installed (it’s free, in all the financial and ad/spyware senses), then you can download it by clicking this handsome line of text or you will be given the option when you click the “I’m online” icon.

Oh and I updated Wordpress to the latest version. Woop.

The MarkMonitor (video production) and Ball Bird (banner) projects have been added to the site.

I’ve been working on a template for my clients to use when reviewing a Circa82 storyboard. It will allow them to make comments about each “slide” of the storyboard. The storyboard screen is most likely to be built in Flash, as I may use it for multiple purposes. The notes/commenting/controls sections will be built using HTML and CSS on top of either PHP + AJAX or Ruby on Rails + AJAX. The aim is to create a modular development area for my clients, that will allow them to make notes about anything I produce for them.

Have a shufty at the storyboard template design (uses album artwork/posters not produced by Circa82 as a guide)

The SBK Healthcare case study has been added to the site. A few more will be added in the coming days once permission has been given by the relevant client.

In other news the Pro Evo Network Charity Shield event is in the process of being setup, and hopefully the first will be taking place before February. I’ve started to get to grips more with my Canon EOS 40D camera, and will be an outlet for business later in the year.

I’ve produced another Circa82 banner (in both the Flash and Animated GIF formats) which will be used on the Pro Evo Network (PEN) site. PEN also requested a Circa82 graphic for their homepage (due to my sponsorship of one of their leagues).

Banners:

Flash version

PEN Homepage Graphic:

A few changes have been made sporadically over the last two weeks to the Circa82 website.

• Captcha (spam protection) introduced to the contact form
  • This needed to be integrated as the spam levels were getting unbearable (I was getting fluent in Russian). A php script creates an image (and text reference) server side, which then checks against the user’s input on the form.
• Page Scroll
  • Whenever a user goes to a subpage, the page scrolls to the main content automatically (IE6+, Firefox). This is to counter some comments I’ve received about the user not knowing if they’ve gone to a new page (especially on smaller screen resolutions). I could have used a page anchor, but thought this had the opposite effect of the user not knowing where they have gone to. I’ll introduce a more robust version later to cover the more gruesome browsers.
• Project Scroller “Preloader”
  • The project scroller is JavaScript as we all know, but I didn’t like how the images were popping up when loaded. I’ve made a few changes to the CSS and markup, so that a small preloader graphic is loaded into each project <a href> background. The actual project graphic is then loaded into a <span> background which is inside the link and therefore loads on top of the preloader graphic.
• Project Scroller Changes
  • Thanks to Ben Marvell for having a look through my code and making a few fixes.

Circa82 site changes

• Print Stylesheet Added
  • Project scroller and graphical elements removed
  • Text size increased for readability
• Handheld Stylesheet
  • Tested on Mio A701 GPS smart phone
  • Quick testing carried out on the Samsung G600 (not perfect)
• Initiated some blog spam protection
• Fixed some w3C compliancy issues with the blog
• Meta data
  • All pages have individual meta data now
• Favourites icon
  • The face of the ‘cheeky’ gnome used on the site has been set as the favourites icon

The handheld stylesheet isn’t perfect on your standard mobile but all the content is readable. Phones that have Windows Mobile installed will produce a much better display. At a later stage I may add some mobile specific features, but this will be something that may or may not come around depending on the stats for the site on mobiles.

I’ll add a quick tutorial tomorrow that shows how to create a favourite icon using Photoshop. Simple I know, but every little helps (dam you Tesco), its a good place to start.

It’s been a long time coming but finally the new site has been launched. Not all components are live yet, but I’m looking to evolve the site bit by bit over the coming year. As requested, the portfolio area has been updated and will be updated whenever a new project is launched. The scroller across the top will show a mixture of the latest and best projects.

Over the coming months some alternate projects are going to be worked on. The first will be a QEE character design. I’ll be showing a step by step of how the design and production is progressing.

I hope you find the new site interesting and that you’ll come back to look at the latest developments. The company is going in the right direction, so I’m gonna try and bring as many of you along for the ride.