Posts by Wes Baker

[ September 24, 2010 ]

Someone Else’s Code

Head down, fingers tapping and teeth gnashing, that’s how you’d find me if I was working on someone else’s code. I want to rewrite it. I mean, it’s awful just look at it. There are no comments and there are ternary operators where they shouldn’t be and they aren’t used where they should be. And to make it all worse, the code is littered with tons of inane variables like temp and iter.

[ March 10, 2010 ]

Why ExpressionEngine?

ExpressionEngine is our non-enterprise Content Management System (CMS) of choice. It’s made by the good folks over at EllisLab. For the majority of our clients, ExpressionEngine meets all of their needs and our needs as well. However, some of our clients ask “Why ExpressionEngine?”, so here are some of the reasons that I find it awesome to work with.

[ February 5, 2009 ]

Workspace

To some of us, workspace seems unimportant. A desk where we place our papers, a lamp to light our desk and generally a place to stash our stuff. Yet, we are there for somewhere near eight hours a day. It's this realization that got me thinking about how little we care about it and how our desk just serves as a big shelf.

When I recognized this I began to look at my desk differently. If you come and look at my desk, it's typically a very good indication of how busy and stressed I am. If I've…

[ January 27, 2009 ]

Craftsmanship

Craftsmanship is:

The skills, knowledge, and dexterity involved in creating works of art. Generally refers to skill in producing expertly finished products; fine workmanship.

Workshops, not Factories

A factory is a production house which is built purely for results and minimizing costs. These are typically fluorescent-lit, taupe-painted, and boring. They manage to remind the employee that they are not smart, they shouldn't make decisions and that they are very expendable.

Contrast this with a…

[ January 13, 2009 ]

Using Opacity

Opacity used to be the domain of flat images made to look transparent. Then came along 24-bit PNGs with their alpha layer and things were a lot better. Now there are several options for opacity:

Transparent PNGs
The opacity CSS property
RGBA color

Transparent PNGs

Transparent PNGs are probably the most used of the lot because they're the most consistent. There ~~are~~ were two downfalls: IE6 incompatibility and image size. Image size is still a problem, but IE6 no longer gives me any problems.…

[ December 16, 2008 ]

Fun with Z-Indexes

Over in Production we are seeing more and more designs with a very layered look. In the past, these have been taken care of with a rough mix of combined images, fixed height and width blocks and lots of luck. But as we move these looks to clients with more dynamic sites, we now have to worry about content growing in one direction or another.

The Setup

For example, here is a comp that came to me:

A few points worth noting about the design:

The menu on the left hand side of the page needs to…