Blog and Web Design Portfolio of Adrian Pelletier » Web http://www.adrianpelletier.com Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:30:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 It’s No Secret: I’ve Been Busy http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2010/08/04/its-no-secret-ive-been-busy/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2010/08/04/its-no-secret-ive-been-busy/#comments Wed, 04 Aug 2010 05:37:46 +0000 Adrian http://www.adrianpelletier.com/?p=1140 One look at the dust on this blog and it’s obvious that I haven’t had a lot of spare time for personal projects. Over the last year, I’ve been a part of some incredible client jobs (such as version 2.0 of Projecturf), moved home and office, spent nearly every weekend at friends and family events, and recently became engaged to my fiancée. While I’ve had no shortage of new web ideas during this time, I just haven’t been able to work on them — until now.

Design Kindle

Design Kindle is a personal project that I’ve wanted to get off the ground for some time now. The web design community is such a welcoming, sharing group of people and the idea behind Design Kindle is to give back. The site will offer a growing collection of handcrafted, premium quality design files absolutely free. You’ll be able to download files instantly without signing up, joining a membership, or paying a single penny. The initial file types available will be graphics, vectors, and coded websites, but other categories will likely be added in the future. All resources will be free for both personal and commercial use.

I’m very excited to see Design Kindle come to life and the list of free files will continue to expand. Development is nearly finished and the site will launch in early September. To thank those who support the project and help spread the word, there’s going to be an iPad giveaway. Check out Design Kindle for details on how to enter and be sure to follow on twitter for more updates. Also, stay tuned for more personal projects on the horizon.

]]> http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2010/08/04/its-no-secret-ive-been-busy/feed/ 12 Rareview Raises the Bar http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2009/03/23/rareview-raises-the-bar/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2009/03/23/rareview-raises-the-bar/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:40:16 +0000 Adrian http://www.adrianpelletier.com/?p=898 rv_newsite

Today, Rareview launched the latest version of their website, boasting their signature style and impressive Flash and Javascript enhancements. The work section, in particular, was creatively organized and includes notes for certain work screenshots. The blog was also updated and I lent a hand in creating the new WordPress theme.

Check out the new Rareview site and their latest projects. I guarantee it is unlike any other agency you’ve seen before.

]]> http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2009/03/23/rareview-raises-the-bar/feed/ 10 How I Chose to Say Farewell to IE6 http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2009/02/16/how-i-chose-to-say-farewell-to-ie6/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2009/02/16/how-i-chose-to-say-farewell-to-ie6/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:09:48 +0000 Adrian http://adrianpelletier.com/?p=741 attention_ie6

The web community has been abuzz lately with talk about dropping support for IE6 and rightfully so! I couldn’t agree more for most sites, though I’m sure there will be the occasional client who either requests IE6 to be included in testing or it turns out their audience actually does use IE6 according to the site’s stats. Nonetheless, the majority of mordern websites could certainly do without supporting IE6. I would guess somewhere between 30% of my development time is spent fixing the crippled browser, if not more, and I’m looking forward to an enormous decrease in frustrations! It was always a frightful thing to fire up Windows and find out what horrors IE had done to a perfectly good site. I don’t blame the browser either; the problem was for too long (way too long) IE6 still had a large user group. Thankfully, those numbers are continually decreasing and I’ve decided this is the year I’ll be dropping support for IE6. If a future client requests the browser to be supported, that’s fine, but it will come at additional costs for the extra development and testing time.

As for how I’m going to ignore the outdated browser, I wanted to notify IE6 users of the issue rather than assume they already knew they were using an outdated browser. My solution was to create a warning message that gets inserted after the opening <body> tag via Javascript. Conditional comments ensure this message (as well as the HTML code within the body) will only appear for IE6 or previous versions. The message is styled in a very Microsoft-esque way so even the hardest-core IE6 user will be able to recognize it. :) Where does the link point to? Firefox, of course.

This site is currently using what I’ve dubbed the “Attention IE6″ script so go ahead and open IE6, then visit www.adrianpelletier.com. I’ve configured the script to work in conjunction with jQuery because that is the framework I was already using but I’m sure you could easily adapt it to fit your own needs. I’m posting a download link for anyone who cares to use this approach on their own website. The setup is very simple, just include the following conditional comment in the <head> of your document.

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<!--[if lte IE 6]>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/ie6.css" media="screen" />
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/attention_ie6.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Next, download the following files and place in the appropriate Javascript, CSS, and images directories:

Download

And so, farewell to IE6. I cannot say that I will miss you.

Update 05/31/2009: I want to emphasize that this experiment is not a fix-it-all solution by any means. As stated above, a large majority of modern websites would have no problems dropping support IE6. For example, this site currently receives around 3% of users on IE6 and that number continues to drop. That’s not a large enough audience to worry about, in my opinion. There are, however, still specific scenario’s where IE6 maintains a much higher user percentage (i.e. corporate businesses that place restrictions on browser updates). In those cases, I do believe IE6 should be included in development testing.

I also do not advocate blocking or punishing IE6 users. My intentions with the above approach were to 1) inform the user that they are using outdated technology and 2) warn that the site may look as it should. However, I have not restricted the user’s access to the site’s content and would never recommend doing so.

I don’t consider this article to be the final answer, not by a long shot. However, I would hope that ideas such as these will at least strike up conversations and thoughts about advancing web development and what the next step should be.

]]> http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2009/02/16/how-i-chose-to-say-farewell-to-ie6/feed/ 18 CSS Type Set Featured on Smashing Magazine http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/12/11/css-type-set-featured-on-smashing-magazine/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/12/11/css-type-set-featured-on-smashing-magazine/#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:12:19 +0000 Adrian http://shiftingcreations.com/blog/?p=188 Cool!

]]> http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/12/11/css-type-set-featured-on-smashing-magazine/feed/ 0 Choosing the Right Home for Your Online Presence http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/03/06/choosing-the-right-home-for-your-websites/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/03/06/choosing-the-right-home-for-your-websites/#comments Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:18:38 +0000 Adrian http://s37188.gridserver.com/blog/?p=156 Of all things related to web design, hosting has quickly become my least favorite. In the past month alone, I’ve signed up with a handful of hosting companies (not all reviewed in this article) and have spent an overwhelming number of hours researching and testing available options. The reason for the change is simply growth and needing a better, more reliable home for both client and personal projects. Not everyone’s hosting requirements are the same so bear in mind, your experience with any of the following hosts may differ from my own.

LunarPages:

I started my first hosting account with LunarPages around four years ago and have been fairly happy with their service overall. The main benefit of a low-dollar shared plan is they can usually offer quite a package for very cheap and, as long as you don’t mind the occasional downtime, it’s a great starting point for personal sites. Obviously, the downfall is you’re likely to outgrow the mild performance and cannot trust the reliability if you intend to maintain any important websites, such as a business. As far as support, grab a ticket and wait in line. The response is usually quite vague and clearly from a list of ready, generic answers.

Media Temple:

(gs) – Personally, the Grid-Service is the ideal plan for my current needs. The package is right, cost is fair, and the control panel is intuitive and easy on the eyes. The pitfall is performance. Load times are comparable to cheaper hosts, at best, and from the short time I’ve been using their service, anything PHP or requiring MySQL is noticeably slower. My initial test pages were identical copies to those I had on LunarPages and the cheaper shard plan was quicker by at least a couple seconds. I turned to support for answers but, sadly, their responses were also slow and basically said, “We’re working on it.” Eventually, I found ways to tweak my page performance and now find the speeds livable. Another minor annoyance is you’re limited to just 5 cron jobs, which is barely enough if you’re hosting multiple sites and have any need for automated tasks.

(dv) – As expected, the dedicated-virtual is much faster than the (gs) or any other shared plan I’ve tried out. Unfortunately, my system resources were constantly pinned between 40-50% usage with no users or active websites. I can understand the server working to run Plesk and other installed software, but to find half of my resources maxed right out of the box was disappointing. Speaking of Plesk, the interface is straight out of the 90′s and ranks in my top ten for ugliest control panels available. I don’t expect my hosting admin to be the most beautiful site there is (afterall, I’m the only one who will see it), but I shouldn’t have to dread using it.

Finally, how hard is it to chase the rats out of the servers? I’ve experienced at least four different occasions in the last month where MT had posted an issue on their known System Incidents, all of them leading to a certain amount of unavailability to my websites.

Mosso:

Alas, a web host with an excellent reputation, great package, beautiful control panel, and even client billing! The load times were great, adding clients was simple, and support is 24/7 and fantastic. Let me say that again: Mosso’s support is by far the best you will find. You can call or chat online with a real person, anytime of the day, about any issues you’re having. The Achille’s heel? For me, it was pricing. There is only one rate at this time which is $100/mo. Also, there are many complaints over the recently implemented requests limit.

The control panel surpasses all others in looks and usability. However, I did find it very annoying that the client control panel lacked a billing area where the client could enter their credit card details. What this means is that after you add a new client onto your hosting, you cannot start billing them until a) you manually gather their credit card numbers yourself or b) send them the url for their billing overview which allows them to enter their data online. If you’re wondering what’s wrong with option b, try searching for said billing link. It’s simply nowhere, not in your admin area, not in the clien’ts control panel, nowhere. I only discovered it after bugging support for a couple nights and, even then, most of the Mosso staff were equally mystified over the missing link. Yes, I understand Mosso is a hosting company and billing services may not be their main priority, but if you’re going to offer that as a feature then it had better work.

The final verdict? If Mosso’s plan fits your needs and budget, do not waste another second hosting anywhere else. You will not find another company with such helpful support and so willing to listen to their customers. I was even offered an adjusted price by my account manager after explaining to him that I was having a hard time justifying the cost with my rather modest hosting requirements. You simply will not receive better support than with Mosso.

]]> http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/03/06/choosing-the-right-home-for-your-websites/feed/ 0 Web Host Survey Results http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/02/15/web-host-survey-results/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/02/15/web-host-survey-results/#comments Sat, 16 Feb 2008 02:44:30 +0000 Adrian http://s37188.gridserver.com/blog/?p=159 Choosing the right host can be a daunting task. I launched version one of Shifting Creations back in summer of 2004, the first site I had ever built exported from Photoshop (yikes). I spent nights after my internship researching and comparing hosts with hardly an understanding of the web technologies each package included. At the time, I thought PERLs belonged on a necklace, PYTHONs were dangerous, and MySQL would have been better off as yours.

With a limited college budget and still not sure if the web was for me (only the year before had I begun any sort of computer design, never mind considering it as a profession), I signed up for a LunarPages Basic hosting plan. The service was cheap, the plan included far more than my one site needed, and support had always answered my beginner questions.

Fast forwarding to present day, my hosting requirements have significantly increased with the number and complexity of web projects I’m involved with. Unfortunately, around mid-January of this year, I experienced my first major issue with LP when all of my PHP driven websites became extremely sluggish. Simple static pages that had easily loaded in under a second before were literally taking minutes to appear, if at all. I spent a solid night testing on all major browsers/platforms, reverting to older file versions, and checking every possible cause I could think of, all without affect on the poor performance. Finally, I uploaded copies of the same PHP pages to a different server not hosted with LP and found the problem non-existent, thus eliminating myself or my files as the culprit.

So in goes the support ticket and out goes my confidence in reliability. In a discussion with LP support lasting over a week, not one staff member could identify (or admit) what the problem was and I repeatedly received vague, rudimentary advice like, “Try clearing your cache,” or, “Use a different browser.” Four years after signing up with LP, I’ve gained a better understanding of PERL, PYTHON, MySQL, and now web hosts.

I’ve since opened an account with Media Temple and the difference, so far, has been black and white. The control panel is a dream compared to CPanel and setting up new sites and e-mail is a breeze. The transition has been smooth and couldn’t have happened at a better time as I’m now offering personally managed hosting services to clients. If I have any complaints with MT, it’s the slow response from support. However, their answers are usually quite lengthy and from what I’ve heard, contacting by phone is the way to go for urgent requests.

In the end, I would still recommend LP to beginning designers or anyone seeking decent, but not great, hosting at a low cost. One issue in four years isn’t terrible and, up to this point, I’ve been very happy with their service. That being said, I look forward to further exploring my MT account and seeing how their service handles my future needs (hint: big projects on the way).

During my quest for the “perfect” host, what shocked me more than the countless different companies available was the minimal amount of helpful reviews I could find. I kept wondering if other designers struggled with this same issue and which host they ultimately chose. So, I selected a list of designers I felt were top in their industry and kindly asked for input on who their current host was, reason(s) for choosing this particular company, and how they felt about the service. Without further ado, here are the results:

Mark Boulton | www.markboultondesign.com

“My current host is Media Temple, after moving from Dreamhost. The primary reason for doing so was downtime and support. Dreamhost was flaky and their support was terrible. Media Temple, so far, has been fantastic.”

Jon Hicks | www.hicksdesign.co.uk

“Segment Publishing: http://segpub.net. I was looking for a reliable host with decent uptime software possibilities, and not shoved onto an oversold server. The main reason I stay with Segpub is the quality of customer service, dealing with a real person instead of a switchboard or forum.”

Steve Smith | www.orderedlist.com

“As far as hosts go, I’ve used 1and1, Dreamhost, and MediaTemple, and none of them compare to my current host, Slicehost.com. The performance has been perfect, literally, and service is fast and easy. Not to mention the price is excellent. As long as your comfortable from the command line, Slicehost is an excellent option.”

Joshua Blankenship | www.joshuablankenship.com

“eleven2 Hosting. I chose them because (at the time) they were a small, hungry company of two guys who I knew in passing and because their plans were affordable.

“In 5 years, they’ve only had one major hiccup which affected my service. They communicated poorly during the downtime. However, since then, they’ve bent over backwards to communicate well, treat me well, and keep my business.”

Veerle Pieters | www.veerle.duoh.com

“I am very happy with EngineHosting and the service is top notch so far. Not so long ago my site + database had to move to new servers and get a new IP and they helped me (I only had to do simple things like putting the system off) and everything went very smooth for such a big move. At my previous host this cost me more than a day downtime. I think my blog was only down for 5 minutes tops.

“As far as I know there aren’t any drawbacks, at least I didn’t find any yet. Great people, personal approach. Maybe the one thing, if you are looking for a development kind of thing I believe they aren’t it because it’s not that they have a control panel like MT where you can fiddle with everything. To me personally that wasn’t important. My main focus was keeping my site uptime as high as possible + on an acceptable speed. I rather worry about my content than fiddling with settings.”

Jonathon Snook | www.snook.ca

“I use Dreamhost. I picked it because, at the time, I noticed a number of other sites using it. While the service hasn’t been fantastic, I still feel it’s the best bang for the buck for personal sites. I wouldn’t put a business site on there, though. Not reliable enough.”

Ethan Marcotte | www.unstoppablerobotninja.com

“Currently, URN is hosted at SegPub. My other, mostly defunct sites (sidesh0w, Vertua) are still hosted at TextDrive/Joyent, where I have free lifetime hosting as one of TextDrive’s first 200 customers (the “VC200,” as they used to call it).

“While TD’s available technologies and customer support were excellent, they had frequent uptime problems during my time there that made launching a new site difficult. SegPub, by contrast, has been excellent—while it’s a bit more expensive than what I could pay for a web host, their support has been unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I’d recommend them in a heartbeat to anyone looking for quality shared hosting.”

Wolfgang Bartelme | www.bartelme.at

“My site is currently hosted at Media Temple. I chose MT because of their high availability and performance. Since I also use my server to store proposals for clients I needed plenty of storage and bandwidth—so MT’s Grid-Service was the best choice.”

Cameron Adams | www.themaninblue.com

“I’ve been using Media Temple for a while now (4/5 years?).

“Their site exudes smoothness—more than most hosts, who generally have terrible site design—this might seem a bit superficial, but the polish gives me confidence. This flows through to their control panel which has the same level of detail and good design.

“The *actual* reason I chose them was mainly because they did some good marketing around the time I was looking for a host — they hosted a lot of design sites at the time (k10k, et al), and I trusted those people.

“Since signing up, the experience has been pretty smooth. No major downtime that I can remember. They’ve been very easy-going with billing (when my traffic has gone over they haven’t charged me) and tech requests (helping on some back-end scripting problems/requests I had). However, I’m not too demanding of my hosts —I don’t need one-click installs and Rails servers or any of that, just plain old PHP and Perl.”

Simon Collison | www.erskinedesign.com

“Erskine Design now work with United Hosting, based in London. We have a few DV servers and so far the service has been excellent.

“For six years across two agencies I’d worked with Media Temple. Initially, their reputation proved well founded and I was happy, running a few DV servers with them. However, customer support was always slow and not very helpful. As the years went by, the performance of the servers got progressively worse, and customer support became so light that often their one-sentence support responses were barely of any use at all. Phoning them yields better results, but I don’t particularly want to call Los Angeles when a simple support ticket should suffice.

“You get Plesk installed by default, and if ever you have an issue with Plesk or need to do something complex with it, they’d just tell you that they don’t help with that. MT’s Dv servers still run outdated PHP and MySQL and showed no signs of ever upgrading, and modern systems and CMSs performed slowly, even on their PHP Rage servers. Rubbish. You get big, and they don’t care, it seems. I have a long list of more technical moans too, but I’ll save you the pain.

“Putting our faith in United Hosting was a brave decision, but we needed to work with people we could talk to or visit in person—people who could build services around our needs. It’s too early to give them a glowing report, but so far so good. And our sites run so, so fast on their servers. Everything is just better.”

Shaun Inman | www.shauninman.com

“Media Temple, on one of their dedicated virtual plans. I have been with them for almost three years now.

“Their reputation and position in the online design community is what originally drew me to Media Temple. I was fed up with the overconfident Dreamhost swagger and the jury-rigged setup (and this was well before the recent downtime and billing scandals). Their prices and features are standard but competitive.

“I can’t complain. My sites are up. Setting up new sites is breeze with Plesk and the Media Temple Account Center. Mileage may vary, of course, but it’s been a smooth ride for my sites.”

A big thank you to all who contributed. If you find you’re not on the list but have an experience you’d like to share, please feel free to do so in comments.

]]> http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/02/15/web-host-survey-results/feed/ 8 CSS Type Set Goes Live http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/02/15/css-type-set-goes-live/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/02/15/css-type-set-goes-live/#comments Sat, 16 Feb 2008 02:30:51 +0000 Adrian http://s37188.gridserver.com/blog/?p=158 csstypeset_header

CSS Type Set is one of the projects I’ve been working on with friends, Travis and Tristan. The site serves as a hands-on tool for beginning designers and developers to interactively experiment with CSS in a WYSIWYG fashion. While similar concepts have been done before, our main focus was delivering a unique, easy-to-understand interface with instant CSS preview and output. When using the style controls, users are able to visually see how their entered text is affected and what code is used to achieve this specific look.

CSS Type Set went live on Wednesday and while we hope many will find the current version useful, there is already a list of additional features we’ll be implementing in the near future. Questions, comments, and suggestions are, of course, welcome.

]]> http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/02/15/css-type-set-goes-live/feed/ 6 SitePoint CSS Reference http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/01/28/sitepoint-css-reference/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/01/28/sitepoint-css-reference/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:10:44 +0000 Adrian http://s37188.gridserver.com/blog/?p=154 I often recommend w3schools to anyone interested in learning more about web languages, specifically HTML/CSS. SitePoint now offers a similar resource which is up-to-date and very easy to understand. Both sites are worth the bookmark.

]]> http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/01/28/sitepoint-css-reference/feed/ 1 DreamHost Web Panel http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/01/23/dreamhost-web-panel-2/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/01/23/dreamhost-web-panel-2/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:14:10 +0000 Adrian http://s37188.gridserver.com/blog/?p=153 Anyone currently hosting through DreamHost? After a recent bad experience with LunarPages not being able to identify a PHP related problem on their servers, I’ve been host shopping for a backup plan. DreamHost seems the likely choice for my needs but I’m curious about their “Web Panel” that is used for controlling all aspects of your account. Unfortunately, there isn’t an online demo or even screenshots. Any input or advice on their service is welcome.

]]> http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/01/23/dreamhost-web-panel-2/feed/ 5 Raka Redesign http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/01/22/raka-redesign/ http://www.adrianpelletier.com/2008/01/22/raka-redesign/#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:37:22 +0000 Adrian http://s37188.gridserver.com/blog/?p=152 Raka Creative, a talented interactive studio in Portsmouth, NH, starts the new year off right with a fresh redesign. If you haven’t taken a peek already, check out their inspirational work and read the touching story on how Raka came to be.

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