New home-page design

For graphic design I used Inkscape and for coding and programming Czech editor PSPad. Again, the website is not compatible with (evil) Internet Explorer 6 (I hope everybody updated the browser by now…), but all modern browsers should have no problem. However, if you find any flow in the design or site behavior, have suggestions to make it better, please use comment section bellow this article or send me your opinion.

However if you were familiar with previous theme and want to temporarily revert back, it is still possible to switch to blue theme – just click the image bellow. (To use current theme again click the “NEW” button next to website logo.)

Click the image to switch the theme

Enjoy the new design as much as I do!

Beauty of CSS is in its ability to separate style from form. That way you don’t need to change every page on your website when redesigning, just change the CSS style sheet. The best example of this principle is website CSS Zen Garden and its gallery. Unfortunately CSS Zen Garden is no longer being updated, but this was starting point for me and I’d say it’s good way to go for everybody starting with CSS.

Web brings plenty of different CSS galleries where you can grab some inspiration or compare what competition is up to or submit your website and hope for good score.  Here are some of those galleries I consider the best:

• CSS Drive – definitely the best one. You will find everything in here.
• CSSArts – just a file of designs without rating system.
• CSS Based – again just a list of designs.
• CSS Collection – as the name says – a list.
• CSSelite – this one has rating system finally ;)
• CSSfights – can be fun with this website. Simply compare 2 designs and choose which one is better.
• CSS Flavor – tastes good. And you can rate.
• CSS Garden – I like it very much despite the lack of rating system.
• CSS Illustrated – gallery with rating.
• CSS Mania – very good gallery!
• CSSstyle.me – pick a design by color, rate it or download some free graphics.
• CSSwebsite – gallery with rate system.
• cssWOW – as they say – “sounds good”.

Go get some inspiration and make yourself a website! Or contact me to do that.

Sex, drugs and rock’n'roll. And money. ;) And the music I like to listen, to play, to compose and to record. About my tips and tricks for home music production (mostly for Cakewalks Sonar DAW software) and what free plugins to use and how to use them.

I also came across quite a mountain of software in last 4 years of intensive internet browsing. I found out that not all good software is commercial and there is a lot of great free replacements. And to my surprise, not many people use them and rather buy some bullshit instead of using (better) free solution.

The Design category of this site is about my webdesign experiences and some beautifying contributions to the world of Linux.

The last category is pretty obvious. It’s about my life, observations, trips, funny and cool stuff and anything else that will come to my mind to give it out to the wild.

Let’s have a look at Lemmonaid from a bit more surgical point of view…

WordPress

First idea of building the site out of crumbs of code I left behind from previous times was …just an idea. It would take long time and I needed some quick and reliable solution that would allow me to create a place with functionality and design I like. So first step was to choose the right CMS for the task. I have experiences with Textpattern and Joomla from the past but none of them made huge impression on me.

Obviously, I came along “the mighty two” – WordPress and Drupal. When I checked them both, Drupal seems to be more complex and complicated and honestly I don’t really like the administrator section look. But although I liked the WordPress’ simplicity and beauty there was still the prejudice “it’s just a blog engine”. Until I saw the work of guys from digitalnature who also created beautiful WordPress theme called Fusion. These guys made me believe in WordPress ;)

Extensive use of JavaScript

Yes, that’s true, and in modern web pretty common also, this website is using JavaScript quite a lot. Most of the effects here I created by myself as I couldn’t find appropriate free replacements that would look and act as cool as mine ;).

Lemmon's Lemmonbox effect

And what about CSS?

CSS is one of the things I can’t live without (greetings to Nataly and my guitars if they’re reading ;)). This little thing uses some CSS 3 styling so please, don’t validate it for 2.1! It is working without JavaScript quite happily too thanks to Cascading Style Sheets but when these two goes hand-in-hand, everything just shines.

As I’m talking about validation, I like to keep my web creations always valid with W3C standards. That assures some kind of quality. Although I if somebody of you spots some invalid spot let me know!

Thank you for reading the first post of Lemmon’s Lemmonaid and I invite you to come back for more and better stuff soon!