Rochester Oliveira
I'm a web designer and entrepreneur from Itajubá (MG), Brasil. I love writing about obscure topics and doing some cool stuff. And also I do some FREE stuff, check it out: http://www.roch.com.br/
1stWebDesigner’s Life #8 – Amnesia and Volunteer
Hello there! Here we are again to laugh at our own stories. Our Webster superhero (brought to life by Jamie Sale) is in trouble again and we’re here to help.
Ok, we’re not going to help him but we’ll at least learn from his mistakes :)
These two particular stories have happened to me quite a few times. And funny enough, they mostly happened while I was working a regular job, as an employee.
Read More
1stWebDesigner’s Life #7 – The New Social Network & Feed Stuff
Hi there! It’s time for a quick break and enjoy 2 more funny stories, brought to you by our awesome cartoonist, Jamie Sale. Oh, and I must say that if you are looking for an illustrator for hire, he’s the right guy.
Today, Webster, our superhero, will deal with an ol’ style client, the one that still thinks that floppy drives and flash websites are the latest technologies out there.
Read More
Mastering CSS Gradients in Under an Hour
Have you refrained from using CSS Gradients because either you didn’t understand them, or thought the browser support for them wasn’t good enough to consider using them in your projects?
Well, it’s time to kill those 1px wide images, my friend.
If you’re just curious about how to use CSS Gradients, this is the place for you. We’ll start with the basics of syntax to very advanced effects with lots of tips and examples.
Remember, learning about CSS gradients is really important since browsers are getting better and better every day. Mobile browsers have good CSS3 support by default.
So, let’s rock!
Read More
1stWebDesigner’s Life #6 – Social Media and a CD Portfolio
The Boss has finally decided to get into this social media thing. Well, you know that can’t be good for our superhero, Webster, right? Also, he’s been doing a great job on a portfolio for his company, do you think The Boss will like it?
Our cartoons were awesomely designed by Jamie Sale. If you need to hire a cartoonist, just call this guy, seriously. Also, if a friend of yours asks for an advice on cartoonists for hire, you know who you’ll recommend, right? Well, I think you got it :)
Read More
1stwebdesigner’s Life #5 – Sales Increase and Crap Site
Hello everyone :) Here we are again with a few more funny things to share.
First of all, I want to say that we’ll be improving this section and our funny content a lot, and the good part is that we won’t be limited to comic strips anymore (tip: how often are you pinning stuff?). Needless to say that after a whole week of working hard you deserve those funny moments.
Today our strips will talk about crazy clients ideas and a misunderstanding over wireframes.
I’m pretty sure you have been requested to do a crazy .gif or a malicious script. So how to deal with it?
And you remember that client who thought that those wireframes were the whole website, even after you explained that a wireframe is a concept validation tool?
Well, let’s laugh at this then!
Read More
12 Things I Have Learned After 7 Years of Freelancing
At the age of 15 I started with this web design stuff. Here I am, almost 7 years later and I wish I knew a lot more about this field rather than learning just by my own mistakes. But you don’t have to pass through all of this, dear Padawan.
There are a few particularities in our field that unless you have a geek dad you would never think about… So if you are aware about what you need to do you can have a much simpler, more productive, and happier freelance life.
The crazy thing is that success is not (just) about coding skills alone. You have to build a whole environment to compensate the instability that you probably won’t face in a regular job.
Finally, here we’ll see a few tips for novice and experienced freelancers, ranging from controlling your finances to networking. And I really want to hear your advice and tips after reading this, because we always have something to share, right?
So, let’s rock!
Read More
Put Your Website on a Diet with Minifiers
Did you know that every second delay on page loading results in a 7% reduction of conversion rate?
Actually you lose 7% (maybe even more!) of sales without even noticing… Sounds bad, huh?
I mean, you work carefully to put things in the right place, good call-to-actions, nice design, spend a few bucks with ads.. And then you lose 7% of sales just because you forgot to minify your CSS. We’ll, this is not going to happen again.
We’ll put every future project that you work on a diet. And this one, won’t wait for next monday, or next january :)
Here we’ll see amazing tips to reduce your files size and increase your site performance without affecting important things like image quality or a files readability for future edits.
Grab your meter and let’s rock!
Read More
1stWebDesigner’s Life #4 – This Big & Developer Client
And here we are again, trying to bring you a couple of laughs.
Our superhero Webster continues his pursuit for the best client, and we all know that he’s quite far from it yet, right? :)
We have two more short stories of Webster’s life (which is kind of similar to ours, huh?) brought to life by Jamie Sale! We’ll be talking about crazy measurement units and clients who want to be web designers.
So, Let’s rock!
Read More
jQuery Mobile – What You Need to Know
jQuery Mobile version 1.0 finally launched this past November. Don’t know if you heard about it, but if you are planning to do any mobile app or website development, it’s better to get started with it right now.
I’m sure you’ve heard about jQuery. So, its mobile version is pretty close to what you already are used to, but with a lot of enhancements for mobile screen events (like touching instead of click, and there is no hover) and browsers (this one is tricky since there are plenty of browsers and devices out there) and capabilities (pluggable components).
The crazy thing is how simple it is to initiate and build a fully working mobile site. Actually, we’ll be talking about concepts, tips, codes, and in the meantime you can build your own app, in no more than one hour. Yeah, noob to ninja in one hour, this is what you’ll get here :)
So, let’s rock!
Read More
5 Must-Know Tips for Better WordPress User Management
WordPress is a great tool to use for managing content. It’s really simple for developers, for managers and for users to use, especially when using a great theme. But if there is one thing that I think that needs to improve yet is its user management settings. I mean, even basic functions need to be coded, like editing a user’s profile fields, add roles, edit capabilities, export user data. All of those need plugins or a little coding to get working.
Here we’ll see 5 amazing and simple tips that you can use right now and greatly improve your user management and you can use all this additional data to serve your loyal readers better and provide more focused content.
We’ll cover custom user fields to history functionality, and while we’re at it you’ll learn a lot about WordPress user management functions.
So, let’s rock!
Read More
