Notebook: Coding

Jul

Making a Mobile Version of Your Site with Mobify.me

I recently asked my Detroit friend and fellow Michigan graduate Jin Kim how he goes about deploying mobile sites. The variance of browsers in the mobile space proves it's far worse than the desktop. Not to mention so many different screen sizes. It's a mess! Detecting for mobile browsers should take place at the server/CMS level. Detecting with JavaScript could result in latency between the server calls and what's rendered in the browser. Rather than deal with all of this, a few minutes with Google searching for "mobile websites" led me to Mobify.me. Mobify.me takes out the guesswork of mobile browser detection and makes it easy to serve up a pretty, mobile version of your HTML/CSS/JQuery-driven site. If you're a designer/developers like me, you'll love the flexibility of Mobify.me. I like it cause its free and it works! In the free version, Mobify.me simply puts a subtle grey link back to their page in the footer and "Mobify" in the page title. Here's a summary of how I got it to work for me.

July 08, 2009 | Tagged in Mobify, Tools, CSS, iPhone, iPod Touch, Mobile

Jun

SEO Friendly Flash Sites for Every Platform

A few days ago I wrote an article based on my professional experience that Flash isn't necessary to make a media-rich, beautiful, SEO-friendly site. Paul Falgout, a lead developer at Otterball read my article and had a great response in disagreement. He favors Flash-based sites that take care to deliver alternate content for mobile users. He shares insight about Otterball's edge - knowing how to build sites that satisfy everyone - designers, clients and search engines.

June 22, 2009 | Tagged in Flash, JQuery, SEO

Jun

A Beautiful Site Doesn’t Have to Be Built In Flash

The majority of my work comes from busy, small-business owners who understandably spend most of their time running their business and NOT browsing the web. They understand they need a website or want some portion of their business to be available on the internet, but they're not exactly sure how to go about it. Sometimes they'll point me to a site they like. I hold my breath as I click-through only to discover the site is entirely Flash-based. *SIGH* There's a better way.

June 19, 2009 | Tagged in Flash, JQuery, SEO

Jun

Web Design is Good, Cheap or Fast. Pick Two.

Sometimes clients don't understand why I can't just crank their 5-page site in a day. There is a truth to the motto: "You can have it GOOD, CHEAP or FAST. Pick two." In that vain, I'm posting my to-do list for this very website. My goal is to crush this list by June 25, 2009 (in addition to my other projects and English/Korean tutoring).

June 19, 2009 | Tagged in Freelance

May

Essential Expression Engine Tools

I built this site using Expression Engine Core. I'm learning EE cause respected designers like Jason Santa Maria and Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain choose EE as their platform. I've got very limited WordPress knowledge, so this isn't intended as a comparison. I've read that EE requires more programming knowledge than WP. Here is a list of tools currently being used on my site. I welcome all of your questions.

May 01, 2009 | Tagged in Tools, Expression Engine, Add Ons

Abbreviated Bio

My name is Amy Stoddard and I'm a balanced left/right brain that can design a comp and code well-written HTML & CSS, JavaScript, PHP and mySQL. Actionscript 2.0 is my old flame. Read More About Me