Visual Lizard
Ross McDowall
Ross is a senior web developer for Visual Lizard. In working for the company for the past 9 years he has steadily upgraded his skills. Both the best and worst thing about this industry is how fast things change. It is great finding new ways to do things, but in finding the new process, it sometimes means having to go back and redo all of the programming that was done the old way. Thus, he fears change... but since the world is always changing, he nevertheless changes with it. He enjoys working for the company as the small staff doesn’t allow for office politics. The office environment allows for independence, creativity, and quick access to a fairly substantial knowledge base.
Ross enjoys roleplaying games, science fiction and fantasy books, and movies. He has his own website which he uses as a place to experiment with his programming skills from time to time. He has done substantial work on the majority of the sites developed at Visual Lizard, with particular pride in working on Destination Winnipeg, The Forks, IMAX Winnipeg, Folklorama and the Winnipeg Airports Authority.
Ross is learning more about developing online web applications including a more comprehensive version of his own diabetes blood sugar testing recorder. He has honed his skills in both PHP and MySQL as these are the primary tools of his trade. His latest goal is becoming fully familiar with the CAKE framework (not easy as I am not good with change *harrumph harrumph*).
In our industry, the concept of standards for web and browser development should be at the forefront. Competition between browsers should not affect how the viewer sees the product which is being developed. It is up to the web developer to determine how a site should look. The browser should just be the platform to view the site, and should not interpret how to display what is written. Unfortunately the browsers are not quite to that stage yet, so for now we have to make the odd piece of non-compliant code to accommodate those browsers. One day soon maybe we will see all browsers following standards. Cross your fingers.
On My Radar
Nicole at Guppy Design
Mar 17, 2010
St. Patrick's Day
Mar 17, 2010
Ross McDowall
Oct 01, 2010
Rememberance Day
Nov 11, 2010
SCU Launches its new online presence
Steinbach Credit Union has relaunched its website with a new look. In preparation for a change in its online banking software and after four years with its previous layout, SCU was looking for a fresh look. The latest version of the SCU site has provided SCU with our new and improved Catalyst 4.0 Content Management System.
The new CMS provides them with substantial flexibility in placing their content throughout the site. The content administration is very straight forward and keeps the content separate from the design and layout which allows the site to have a cohesive look during the maintenance and updating of their content.
The design presented us with some specific coding and stylistic challenges.
The home page displaying the three section options had to display horizontally centred dependent on how tall the browser window was set, and if the user changed the size of the window, the positioning would adjust to compensate. Using some specific javascript and css rules we were able to accomplish this. Once we had it working in highly standards compliant browsers we moved on to making it work on those browsers that have not yet worked out all of their standards issues.
On the three landing pages we were asked to provide some customization functionality in order to personalize the user’s experience on the site. We built and provided a few widgets for this personalization. For those people who registered to customize their landing pages, they can choose from up to three little widgets at this point.
There is a Stock Watch, Weather and Currency Conversion widget to choose from.
Additional touches to the site included some javascript functionality to slide content left and right so as not to have the page scroll. With some creative css and javascript coding we were able to achieve a site that while some pages require scrolling, the navigation and footer do not move or disappear allowing the user to have constant access to their navigation.
In a number of cases the design which we had to apply to the site was somewhat counter-intuitive to what is standard practice in web development, however with a lot of work we were able to provide SCU with the design they wanted working the way they wanted. It must be remembered at all times in the service industry that the client’s perception is always correct.
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