I’m a full time web administrator for a community college in Pittsburg CA. I also have a little time left over to freelance so check through my gallery for some examples of my work. I love figuring out new ways of doing things and finding the best solution for my clients. I love teaching people what I know so they may learn the things I have learned from others. Have fun reading and don’t forget to comment!
Beginning Photoshop CS5 hands-on course in Antioch
I will be teaching 6 hours of hands-on training in Adobe Photoshop CS5 at the Antioch Recreation Department. You’ll start with a basic introduction of the interface to feeling comfortable with many of the tools. You’ll fix photos and create your own artwork from scratch. Registration Information...
read moreCollege website gets a makeover
I’m excited to be able to show a sneak peak of my colleges new website due to go live on Tuesday! I originally revamped the site in 2003 and it was good for the time but then the content outgrew itself. This new launch was a year in the making with the first half of the year doing nothing but usability testing with our various audience profiles with several different navigation structures. You can read about the process of the usability study here. The main goal was to have a website that was easy to find information and still provided a...
read moreGoogle docs form for garden data collection – way too simple!
This is for everyone who has had to create forms on a website to collect information. Unless there is some sort of automatic widget built in to your content management system this can be a complicated or time-consuming task. Google has made this ridiculously simple though so in case you aren’t aware I thought I would share with you how easy it is to make a slick little data collection form in just a few steps. Create a Google account (https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount) or if you already have a Gmail account just login and click...
read moreCode snippits I always use in the footer
My email program of choice is gmail because it’s so easy to use and they are constantly improving their product. What the main reason is I use it is for is the filtering and search. I have a filter I set up called “code snippits” and any time I want to save a bit of code even if really small I can just go to that filter and search with in that filter for something I saved. Whats more is that I can access gmail from anywhere so my code snippit library is always with me. Adobe Dreamweaver has the ability to save snippits of...
read moreEstimating time by weighted average
Anyone who knows me is going to find it extremely strange that I of all people should post a math formula! When it comes to managing your projects though there doesn’t seem to be any way around it. Your client is always going to want to know how long the project is going to take. You’re going to want to know too since you don’t really want to work for peanuts. It’s difficult at times when the projects are complex and lots of factors involved. I was discussing this with a friend the other day and it made me remember a...
read moreWhat’s that typeface???
Ever want to know what a particular type face is? Then this is a great resource! I saw a design on the internet and liked the font for the word photographer. I took a screen grab of the word and then uploaded it to myfonts and it worked great! See for...
read moreMaking off-site link icon
I’m currently putting together a fairly large site for a college that has “mega list”. I will post more about that in another posts but basically mega lists allows you to see columns of information all at once. It’s different from an old style drop down menu in that items are broken up into categories of content much like you would see categories in a supermarket. It helps people to scan the categories in a store and think about which isle they might find something. Another helper in making websites more usable is to...
read moreA little Dreamweaver selection trick
It never ceases to amaze me that I can work in the Adobe products day in and day out and still learn little tricks. Forgive me if you are already know this but just learning this helps to save me time and to save my eyes so I need to share it with you. Have you ever wanted to select a portion of code from one page and paste it into another? Have you ever tried to scan the code with your eyes finding it difficult especially if you didn’t comment your code out or space it out very well? The easiest way for me has always been to scan the...
read moreFloating in the clouds
In this tutorial I am going to show you how to make your text float in a cloud but really you could do this with any object. Start with a good photo of some clouds or download the source files at the end of this post to try it for yourself. Make sure there are areas of the clouds that are very white so you can get it to wrap around better. I played with the level in the photo to adjust for this slightly. Make sure that your clouds are on the bottom layer in photoshop. This will work with CS4 as well at CS5. I am not sure about CS3. Click the...
read moreWebmaster tool I just had to share!
I currently use Adobe Dreamweaver for a lot of my repetitive tasks in web design. It’s a great tool for managing lots of files and links between them all but as with all the Adobe products it can be a little too helpful at times. For example it formats your HTML for you so it’s easy to read. When you try and make a simple table it makes all the indent so it’s easy to see where are all the headers and rows are etc. So a simple two row, two column table looks like this when created in Dreamweaver <code><span...
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