Wow! Here’s an amazing video by Dr Shai Avidan and Dr Ariel Shamir to support their paper on ‘Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing’.

It’s a few minutes long, but it’s worth watching to the end - where they make people disappear! Ooh!

To be able to seamlessly extend or contract an image, without causing distortion - priceless!

I’d highly recommend watching it.

So many people these days claim to be able to make websites, long gone are the days where it was seen as some kind of clever, voodoo, dark magic. Programs like Dreamweaver and Frontpage have brought web design to the masses. No longer do small companies have to pay thousands to create great looking and effective websites… They can just get their mate’s kid to knock them something together for a couple of hundred quid!

It really bugs me when I hear people talking like this.
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Everyone wants a website these days, infact you could say that everyone ‘needs’ a website these days. It’s become just about as important as business cards and a yellow pages listing were 15 years ago. But there are quite a few things to consider before thinking that a website will solve all your business problems. It takes more than just flashy graphics to make a good website.

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User interface design is critically important when designing good and useable websites. It’s often something that’s overlooked or taken for granted by the general public as they use a site, but the basic principles are often applied by designers almost without them realising. Good design more often than not goes hand-in-hand with good user interface design and is a result of creating interfaces which people find intuitive and straight forward to use.

Some basic points to bear in mind when creating a website design:
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I’ve always found it a little tricky to write truly valid forms, yet still keeping the layout looking anything half decent. I guess you can hack it around a bit and float div’s left and right, but it somehow always seemed a rather long-winded way to go about things. So I’ve always just used a table based layout for my forms… I started using the label tag a little while ago, which I believe adds to the accessibility of forms, but apart from that the way I code hasn’t changed much over the years… Until now…

I’ve found a great CSS based layout template for forms which claims to be both semantically correct and accessible, it also (I believe) validates to W3 standards, so here’s the page that shows you how to make accessible web forms.

A little thin on the ground with regards to the graphical elements but at first glance looks like a useful wireframe layout guide for building validated CSS based sites.

Check out the nice and free CSS layout templates available at mycelly.com

If you want to pimp your site and make it look the business take a look at these great AJAX script resources. AJAX is a bit of a buzzword at the moment which I don’t particularly agree with, especially as there are plenty of cool web2.0 effects which might be branded as AJAX script when infact they don’t have any AJAX requests at all. But it’s fair to say that it does represent the modern approach to web design.

So here are the links.

http://www.miniajax.com/
http://www.ajaxrain.com/

Well I finally did it! I read everything on the Internet, it took a very long time and many late nights, but I can happily say that I finally feel a sense of closure. Having digested all the billions of opinions, comments and down right nonsense out there. So here it is for everyone to share… The last page on the Internet.

If you’ve ever read a blog or bulletin board online you’ll know they are a great source of useful, insightful and interesting comments but you’ll also know the majority are just complete rubbish posted by people who wouldn’t normally speak their mind quite so bluntly. It’s basically an excuse for people to not engage their brain before speaking!

Here’s what would happen if a took the online approach to the real world.

Ok maybe a slightly strange choice of category title, but I needed somewhere in our lovely little blog to share with the world all the amazing new things we discover which just make us go ‘WOW’! I’ve been looking on Ajaxrain.com lately (fantastic site by the way guys) and there have been quite a few times when I’ve just had my socks blown off I’ve been so impressed, check out my favourites so far.

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