Webstrong Ltd

I was recently asked what I love most about my job and as tends to happen, I fluffed my way through the answer, not really doing the question any justice.  So I thought I’d write a post about it.  I’m well over a year in Webstrong now and have gotten to do a vast array of different things such as websites, content management systems like Wordpress and Drupal, old school email marketing templates, forums, SEO work,  e-commerce websites and most importantly for me, breaking into the development side of things. I thought recently how different it could have been…

I think that’s one of the great benefits of working in a small company, you have to be able to throw your hand at anything or have an idea how to do a bit of everything.  If starting off I had of gotten a job with a big company,  I probably would have been pigeon holed into a particular task and not been given the chance to do anything else. “Oh you know HTML, CSS, bang….you’re our frontend guy, sit over there do the same thing all day over and over again.”  I’d go on to frequent murky bars like a lost soul, destined to lead a life of ordinariness and un-fulfilment.

Whereas in a small company it’s the complete opposite. You get exposure to everything, the learning curve is much steeper but as a result you grow a lot quicker. Yeah this can happen in a big company too, but the chances are a lot less of it happening for you, you’d have to be ‘in’ with the right people, do a bit of brown nosing, show a bit of leg maybe, all that politics stuff that I would never have the patience for myself (or the legs I’m told).

So to answer my own question, what do I love about my job? The fact that everyday I come in I can be working on something different, I’m always learning new things along the way and becoming better at what I do, each project undertaken throws up fresh challenges and I can apply new things I’ve learned from previous projects and constantly fine tune and tweak them in the never ending search for perfection. You have to love what you do or what’s the point? The repetitiveness of a 9-5 was my worst nightmare, one nightmare I’m glad to say I’ve awoken from.

So what do you love about your job?

We started exploring CSS frameworks a bit last year so thought I’d share what we’ve learned. Overall I’m very happy and delighted we made the move. I must admit at first I didn’t give them much thought, “I don’t want to be using someone else’s code, I want to write my own” I’d think. These are the ramblings of a foolish man.

With projects ever growing in size and scale, when starting a new project you want to be hitting the ground running and using a good framework plays a huge hand in this. Within minutes you have the whole skeleton of your site up and running and ready for the trickier more unique elements.

I first looked into Blueprint, but was put off by the unsemantic naming structure. So after that we cast our shadow over OOCSS and decided to give it a try. Out of all the files you get in the download, there are 3 in particular that I use constantly now in every project. I’ll link to the files and you can Firebug the hell out of them, then I’ll go through each of them.

• template.css
• grids.css
• content.css

Template

The template is obviously the frame of your site. In here you have eight main classes, throw these onto your page and you’re instantly ready to start focusing on the unique parts of your site and skip past all the repetitive parts. The classes are…

• .page (your page container, which is 950px wide, if you want a narrower / wider page you just extend this with a nicely named class of your own ex. “.myPage”)
• .liquid (takes up the 100% width of the screen in a liquidy fashion)
• .head (your header)
• .body (for clearing floated properties, for instance your leftCol or rightCol)
• .rightCol (yep)
• .leftCol (that’s right)
• .main (this takes up the full width of your container)
• .foot (exactly)

The left and right cols are great and easily changed, if halfway through the site the client decides they want the sidebar on the left instead of on the right, it’s just a matter of renaming “rightCol” to “leftCol”, without ruining the structure of your site. By default the leftCol is 250px and the rightCol is 300px, but like the .page if you want a custom width you simply extend it with a class of your own.

Grids

The grids I was most impressed with, they’re just so handy and flexible. I could explain them in grave detail, but simply study this page a bit and it will explain it perfectly, with great code examples under each section. You can have complex pages laid out in no time. Again if the structure of your site changes halfway through, these scale beautifully and are easily changeable. No more sleepless nights worrying of sudden changes from awkward clients.

Content

Finally there is the content.css file, the best part of this is I rarely ever have to bother worrying about sizing h1-h6 tags. They’re all sized in perfect proportion to the rest of the content on your site. For instance your h1 is 196% bigger than your normal font-size, your h2 is 167% bigger and so on it goes down the chain.

Benefits

So these three files I found enormously helpful in speeding things up. One of the main differences was less cross browser issues, at the end of building a site before using a framework, I’d always check it in Safari and Chrome, “yeah, that looks fine”, then check it in Explorer, “oh for the love of god…”. Now when I check it I rarely ever have any issues and if there is they’re pretty minor. Also I don’t have to keep checking to see what I named things, I know of the top of my head what everything should be called, you have the consistency factor across all your projects. There are much more in the download, but I’ve just covered the main one’s I found most helpful.

Check out the whole package yourself here and check out the creator here.

Every day people like you waste hours of the day doing stuff that’s unnecessary and unplanned. You’re wasting your time doing things that don’t matter.

You probably work 9-5 and find ways to fill the day just so you can go home at the end of it and tell everyone you were really busy.

But what did you get done? What did you do that day that actually brought you closer to what you want? Could you have done it in less time? Could you have been more focused on the important stuff and gone home early instead?

We’ve had the same problem here at Webstrong, working on stuff that doesn’t pay, doing jobs that don’t help us reach our goals, while all the while making us busier then we’ve ever been before.

It had to stop. We had to find an easier way.

Having recognised this, we’re now finding ways to cut through the bullshit, get more done, and make ourselves a lot less busy, doing the more important work first. The stuff that’s enjoyable to work on and the stuff that pays. But we’ve had to go through a very tough time before we got there. A few months ago, we nearly went bust. Not from a lack of work, but from a lack of cash. In this post, my first in a long while, I’ll try to explain how it happened, and what we did to fix it.

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This is the first post by Webstrong’s web designer, Philip Brant. Philip has come from a background in website design and recently went on a 14 week introduction course to PHP and Smarty, two of the core technologies we use here at Webstrong. This post gives Philip’s views on the course and it’s benefits.

Greetings all, this is a brief rundown of the course I underwent from February-May of this year.

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