David Behan's Web Design Ireland Blog

Penina Apartments

We’ve been working hard on a new site for an apartment complex in the Algarve, Portugal that has had a great appeal to me personally. As many of my friends, work colleagues and clients know - I’m a golf fanatic! I’ll play as often as I can, weather permitting and I’m constantly trying to get my handicap down.

What makes Penina Apartments different is that they have a special golfing offer available to anyone who stays with them. Up to 6 people can stay in each apartment and of those, up to 4 residents can enjoy a free daily round of golf at the Henry Cotton designed Penina Championship Golf Course. Prices vary between each apartment and the week you book but taking one of the weeks in November, a 3 bedroom apartment can work out at GBP 700 (approx. EUR 860). Dividing that in to 4 golfers, it works out at €215 per person for their accommodation and their golf for the week. As many golfers will recognise, that’s a great offer.

I welcome my readers to check out the website and see what you think. If any of you are interested in a round of golf sometime, do give me a shout or leave a comment - I’m always up for a game.

Over the past 2 months, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a great company, to upgrade their web presence. There was a number of requirements for the site: make it look good, make it more accessible and visible to search engines, and make it pink.

The company is the Select Digital Print Group, based in Tallaght, Dublin 24. They specialise in digital printing, sign and display, creative design and print. Here’s a preview of the site and I think we’ve ticked all 3 requirements for their site: looks good, seo friendly and pink!

www.selectdigital.ie

I’d like to wish Tara and everyone at Select Digital, the very best with the website and their continued success. As I mentioned, it was a pleasure to work with them and I’d recommend you check them out for your creative design and digital print needs in the future.

I’m already looking forward to designing my next pink website. Any takers?

Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve been blown away by an application for the Internet but yesterday I was. I got an email from a fellow designer (thanks Aoife) to a cool application that works for Internet Explorer, Firefox (pc and mac), and Safari. The application is PicLens and in a nutshell, it’s an image gallery viewing tool that sits above your browser (in full screen when open) and makes life much easier than traditional thumbnail listing, click for larger image, next page, etc.

If you’ve ever tried navigating a photo gallery on somebody’s bebo, myspace or facebook page, you’ll know what a headache it can be. With this application installed, you click an icon on supported images and it loads all the images into a cool interface that shows all the images on a “virtual wall” that you can skip along quickly, zoom in, zoom out, start a slideshow, and more. It’s hard to describe how it works but the best thing I can suggest is to just try it. For Mac users our there, it’s like looking at images in cover view.

My First Implementation

Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall
This got me thinking about the application of such a tool into my every day life and I’ve come up with my first implementation. I subscribe to css galleries to keep a fresh of new techniques and designs. I put the collection into a little web app for my viewing pleasure. However, it’s not that easy to browse and find what I’m looking for so I decided to integrate PicLens into it. I’ve come up with a cool Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall that I can quickly flick through, find a site I like and open it directly all from within PicLens. You can try it out for yourself but make sure you are using FireFox and have the PicLens extension installed as I haven’t configured it for IE or Safari yet. I’ve got a number of ideas floating around for this in my head but I imagine any site I create in the future that has a photo gallery will have support for PicLens or similar apps. I can’t see me ever browsing a gallery using standard pages if I can use PicLens instead.

Using PicLens for Web/Stock Image Searches

There’s a built in search facility that allows you to search for images on Google, Yahoo, Flickr and DevianArt. The results show up in the app and when you find a pic you like, you can click a button (top left) and it will bring to the page it is from. Way cool! We were chatting on Irish Webmaster Forum about the app and James came up with a great use of the app. I, and a lot of other designers, love iStockPhoto for images for our websites. It can be very annoying and time consuming trying to find the right image so instead of using iStockPhoto’s built in search, you can use PicLens to search Google Images for “site:istockphoto.com business” and you’ll get business related results. You can quickly browse them and open the iStockPhoto page that has the image for sale. I’m sure this same technique could be used on countless other websites too.

Well, that’s it for now. Hope you like the app and let me know what you think with a comment below. Any other good uses of this tool you can think of? Tricks? etc? To finish… Here’s a few screenshots of PicLens on my Web Design Inspiration Virtual Wall. 2 thumbs up to the guys at who created it! Superb!

Screenshots

Well over the past few months, I’ve been working hard with a couple of the guys on my team to launch a new website called ourmemoryof.com. This website is aimed at people who may have just suffered the recent loss of a friend or family member, and will allow them to create a memorial website in their tribute. The website they create will allow visitors to view messages from the family, photos, videos, messages of condolence and contribute to the site with their own messages of condolence.

We’ve just moved into alpha testing and we’re welcoming people to sign up for the beta test or to be notified when the new site goes live in early Spring 2008. You can visit the website by visiting the link below.

Memorial Websites

If you like to know more about the project or have any feedback at this early stage, please do not hesitate to contact me directly or leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading! Rgds, Dave

Last week saw the launch of the new Blue Sky Mortgages website. Blue Sky Mortgages are a network of mortgage brokers across Ireland, that help their customers save money by switching mortgage providers, help first time buyers get on the property ladder with the best mortgage, and a lot more. Their new website exhibits a web 2.0 feel, a number of DHTML features, Google Maps of their offices, as well as being fully XHTML 1.1, WAI AAA and Section 508 compliant.

Visit their new website at www.blueskymortgages.ie

Today, we launched the new website for Pat McGovern & Associates, a building surveying company based in Navan, Co. Meath. Pat McGovern & Associates provide residential surveys, commercial surveys, land surveying and architectural services from their 3 offices in Meath, Dublin and Cavan. Their new website exhibits a web 2.0 feel, DHTML features, a Google Map of their offices, as well as being fully XHTML 1.1, WAI and Section 508 compliant.

Visit the new website at www.patmcgovern.ie