My Web Design: Tony Rauti Luxury Homes

I've had a couple of requests lately by potential clients asking to see some of my recent web designs. I figured I'd start off with one the small business web designs I'm most proud of Tony Rauti Luxury Homes. They're a custom home builder in Windsor Ontario and the surrounding area. A friend of mine referred them to me and in a matter of days I was meeting with them to discuss potential ideas. Here's what we came up with after all was said and done:

This is a very elegant design done primarily with HTML and CSS. Showing off their recent works was something they were very interested in doing so I figured I'd make 60% of the homepage a content slider of the exterior and interior designs of their custom homes in Windsor. Along with the web design & development, I also did a bit of on-site search engine optimization, and social network marketing. I also implemented a beautiful photo gallery using Lightbox.

All in all it was a delight to work with the people at Tony Rauti Luxury Homes on their web design. I look forward to working with them in the future!

Most Frustrating Browser For A Web Designer Is....

With most of the major browsers coming out with new versions these past couple of weeks, I figured I'd write a quick post about the most frustrating browser for web designers like myself to code in. Drum roll please..... Internet Explorer 6! No big surprise there. I'm guessing if you polled 100 web designers on which browser they hate coding for the most, it'd be IE6.

IE6 is almost 10 years old now and it's still being used by 12% of all Internet Explorer users. You'd think now that IE7, 8 and 9 have been released most of those people would update, but that's just not the case. From the way it doesn't render transparent PNG's as transparent or the way it handles the general layout of CSS and DIV based designs IE6 is just awful.

Even Microsoft themselves are trying to get people off of IE6 starting this website about a month ago; http://ie6countdown.com/. If you're using IE6, please update to a newer version or better yet, jump over to Firefox or Chrome. They're better browsers anyway!

Web Design Review - ArcheryBuff.com

I had lunch with a friend of mine who I went to college with last week and we started talking about what we've been doing lately. He told me he's moved on from being a web programmer to being someone who designs Blackberry themes. He mentioned that he had started a site a couple years ago about archery and he asked me to check it out and give it a review. Keep in mind that my friend is more of a web developer than a designer!

As far as the design goes, I'm really not a fan of this site at all. The good news for my friend is that he's one of the few Windsor web designers who'd focused on archery so the site does fairly well traffic wise.

When I wrote him back this week about the site, I told him I thought it could be much better. I thought he should get a cleaner, less busy logo and header. I also think the site should be a different color, I've never been crazy about that color brown for a site. I understand he was going for a forest/nature look, but there are ways to do that without making the site look so dark.

I would make his links a different color than the text (both are black right now, could get confusing) and lastly I'd make the Adsense ads blend in with the rest of the site.

He may have me re-do the design of the site while he works on the web development side of it, so if that happens I'll update this post!