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 #3 – Mind Reading & Doing The Whole Site
It’s time to get back to our funny project, 1stWebdesigner’s Life. We’ve received such great feedback from our first and second web comic that we’ve decided to make it a really cool bi-monthly series to brighten your Sundays. We’re back with Webster brought live by Jamie Sale!
Today we’ll talk about clients that think we can read their minds, and misunderstandings about what your job is and what it isn’t but your client may think it is. So let’s go through them.
How To Create An Effective FAQ For Your Website
Frequently Asked Questions is a good section to have in your website. They give users a chance to figure out things by themselves instead of wasting resources (both yours and theirs) with a 1-to-1 conversation (chat, Skype, messenger and so on).
But FAQ’s are a different type of content. Just like search and sitemap, it has its own particularities and things that you can do to improve user experience. You have to keep in mind, for instance, that users don’t go to FAQ pages, you have to lead them there.
Here we’ll see a couple of thoughts about it, good practices, inspiration and tools.
So, let’s rock!
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7 New Year’s Resolutions To Help Improve Your Personal And Work Life
So are you ready for doing awesome things (remember, this year can be the last one)? And which things do you want to do? When are you doing them? How will you know by the end of 2012 that you’ve done all that you wanted to?
There is a simple tool to help you keeping tracks of you accomplishments: write down your new year’s resolutions.
I see a lot of people talking about nerdy things, like “learn a new programming language” or “write more about what you know” but the truth is if you aren’t satisfied with your personal life you won’t get better results at work. You need to improve yourself in both sides so you’ll be a better you.
Well, what we’ll see here is a kind of “new year’s resolutions template,” with a lot of ideas that you can steal and we’ll see how to keep track of them.
Don’t forget to check 20 New Year’s Resolution Ideas to Become Better at Your Career!
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Creative Christmas Gift For Geek Lovers – Web & Mobile App
Oh, Christmas. The magic time when you spend all the money you’ve been saving the whole year. Oh, and we have all that Christmas Spirit, of course.
Now, you probably want to spend a lot on your soul mate’s gift, to show her how deep is your love.
Yeah, money can buy cool things, but guess what: almost every year I make my own gifts for my girlfriend (but I always have to buy something else anyway). And I feel that she just loves when I do something by myself instead of just buying it (unless shoes, she wouldn’t like if I made her a shoe). So I’ll show you, dear Padawan, how to make a cool one-page-gift for anybody that you like.
Our goal here is to do a simple “slider”, where a lot of messages and pictures that you like are shown. In the meantime you’ll learn a little bit about design, jQuery and CSS3.
So, let’s rock!
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Customize WordPress With Four Easy-To-Add Scripts
Probably at some point you wanted to customize things in WordPress instead of using the “default” for every page. Like a pretty image gallery in a few posts, a syntax highlighter for your tutorial category or a demo page for your tutorials.
Well all those things break the standard, so people will see it as “impossible” to change. Should you put the following scripts on every page? No. That would be a waste of resources, since you’ll load a lot of useful things many times. Should you put them directly in your content (dear lord, please, don’t ever do this)? This would be really hard to maintain, since every simple change would be a big waste of time because you would have to make those changes post by post.
Let’s see a couple of ways to get this easily working.
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Create Elegant Tags With Sliding Post Count For WordPress
Tired of the boring category style being always same, like a mini menu? Tired of items arranged horizontally or vertically, styled always the same way? Yes, I’m tired of it too. So let’s make things more interesting now.
Our starting point will be a cool sliding tags design made by Thomas Bosée. Then we’ll learn how to use WordPress wp_list_categories function, how to edit its result, how to code CSS and finally a little of jQuery “Black Magic”.
So, let’s rock!
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Using HTML5 Video The Easy Way
If you haven’t had a good reason to learn HTML5 video, let me give you one: Flash mobile is dead. Mobile is the new black, many people say that by 2014 more people will be browsing with their mobile device than using a desktop. You know, if we get through 2012 of course. So more then using CSS media queries and cool coding tricks, you need to be ready to switch also the way you post videos online.
Now you may be asking yourself if it’s hard to implement HTML5 video, or if it’s worth the effort. Well, dear friend, it’s way easier than you think.
We’ll see today a few different ways you can implement it, and a few more things that you should be aware of.
So, let’s rock!
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Definitive Mobile Guide – 40+ Tools, Frameworks And Tutorials
The mobile market is getting bigger and bigger. A lot of people are spending much more time mobile browsing than desktop. Sometimes I feel like developers aren’t paying proper attention to mobile interfaces. Maybe because we don’t have enough tools to do it, right? No, actually it isn’t.
Despite cool things like Safari Mobile that makes any (non-flash) website “browsable” it’s easy to see that conversion rates are much higher on interfaces design for mobile viewing.
So be ready to see A LOT of tools to help you create cool things for mobile with just what we know (HTML, CSS, JS).
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7 Things Clients Should Know About A Web Designer’s Job
Clients always have a lot of questions, don’t they? They ask a lot of questions because they just don’t know how things work on this “Internet thing”. They just want their pretty site online and with Comics Sans, please.
So, guess who will have to tell them the bad news, and teach them the basics? Yeah, I’m looking at you.
We, at 1stwebdesigner, are nice guys so we’ll help you with a few common things that clients don’t understand, but they really need to, because when they do, everything will be much easier and more pleasant to do.
So, let’s rock.
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1stWebDesigner’s Life #2 – High Exposure Job & Darker Than Dark
I hope you liked our very first strip about flash banners and introducing our characters. We’ve got a lot of cool names suggestions, and one that our team really enjoyed is “Webster”, by Laurel G. We have some other cool variations (like Coddy Webber) but we’re still open to more suggestions if you have a better idea :)
Today we’ll be talking about 2 funny situations that I think you may have experienced. So let’s go through them.
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