cyanlion.co.uk

Pagan Winter Solstice Cards

caradore — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:33:26 +0000

I’m now selling good quality A4 folded Winter Solstice Cards on my art site:

http://www.naturalmagic.co.uk

All my cards are printed on A4 (297mm x 210mm), high quality 350gsm white recycled board and come with white C5 diamond flap envelopes.

You can either buy them individually or at a reduced price for a pack of four.

If this is successful I plan to have more cards printed and possibly in time stock other Pagan Artists work.

New small business web design package

caradore — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 08:06:54 +0000

New small business web design package: For those customers wanting a small but perfectly formed web presence, I’m now able to offer a small business package of £100 for a home page and contact page with a form, additional pages are charged at £25 each and can always be added at a later date. This will include two designs to choose from but does not include additional artwork or logo design or additional expenses such as stock photography. If you want to register your web presence for £100, please let me know.

New Scottish Christmas and Yule cards

caradore — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:06:18 +0000

You may not know this but my name Gillean, is not Gillian with an e but a variation of McLean my mother’s maiden name and I always liked the tartan so I thought I’d a Christmas card with it on.

I have toyed with doing other images and tartans so let me know if you’re interested – as always my creativity outweighs my time but I will have a go.

What a busy summer…

caradore — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:07:45 +0000

Well work wise things have been quiet over the summer as we’ve bought our first house in Cullompton. We had a month overlap to decorate before we moved in but the house has taken up most of the summer.

As it’s now Mabon, the Autumn Equinox my mind is turning to Yule and Christmas and I have a few ideas for new cards, so watch this space.

New Graphic Art website

caradore — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:36:48 +0000

For years I’ve been creating graphics and uploading to online shops like Cafepress and Zazzle, my cardshop on Greetings Card Universe and finally, vector art for istockphoto.com. I decided I needed a better way to display them, so I have created a new website, where you can view thumbnails of each of my images and see where you can buy it and on what.

So please checkout my new site www.naturalmagic.co.uk

The site will be on an ongoing process as I put all of my old images on and add new images, so please check back regularly.

Dreamcatcher inspirational card

caradore — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:28:37 +0000

The dreamcatcher is my most popular image on istock and I thought it would make a nice inspirational card, so I added a starry background and a nice little verse – let me know what you think.

This image is also available on Zazzle and Cafepress

New Thank you for being my Flowergirl Card

caradore — Sat, 29 May 2010 14:54:07 +0000

After creating my blonde bridesmaid I thought I would have a go at a variation so I did a black one although giving it tags has been interesting. In the UK we use the term black but in the US they want to use the term African American which fine if you are American but not if you are British. Many of the black people in this country are of Afro-Caribbean descent so Anglo African doesn’t really work. It caused an interesting debate on the forums for Greetings Card Universe. If you’d like to give your opinion on what the pc term is now please feel free to comment.

This card is available as Please be my Bridesmaid/Flowergirl and Thank you for being my Bridesmaid/Flowergirl – to purchase it please click on the image. The image is not available on istock as they rejected it – so to them. If you would like a vector of this image, please contact me and I will create a bespoke one for you.

New Yule Card – Snowy Owl

caradore — Thu, 20 May 2010 10:47:10 +0000

I know it’s really not the time to be designing Winter cards but as you may have noticed I like birds, and this just popped into my head. This card also available as a Solstice and Christmas card so check out my Greeting Card Universe Store for other options and ideas.

Validating websites

caradore — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:37:58 +0000

It always amazes me how many web developers don’t validate their website code. To me it shows that they are unprofessional and possibly lazy, it’s not a difficult task and if you are writing good web code then it shouldn’t be difficult to validate a site.

So what is validation? There is a non-profit making organisation called W3, the World Wide Web Consortium that develops standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. It’s sponsored and supported by all the big IT organisations Microsoft, IBM, Apple etc. They provide on an online validator http://validator.w3.org/ that will show whether your website has valid code. Valid code means that all of the code works, it’s clean, tidy and functional. It’s useful for developers as it picks up errors and shows what and where they are so that you can fix them. Why don’t you check your website to see how good your web developer really is?

So as well as showing that your web developer really knows how to code, what else is validation useful for?:

1. Cross browser support – this means your website should look the same in all browsers. Have you noticed there are more about these days, Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari?

2. Which leads us to accessibility. Accessibility is big news these days, do you want to discriminate against someone because they have a disability, if your website doesn’t work in specialist browsers for disabled people you could be accused of being discriminatory.

3. If your web site is built to certain standards it means that if your web developer ups and moves to Timbuktu that any other competent web developer should be able to update and maintain your website.

4. Despite what they might tell you, there is little or no certification for Web professionals, and only few universities teach Web technologies. I was quite lucky in my degree that this was covered in extra courses after our exams in the second and third year. Able professionals will take pride in creating Web content using semantic and well-formed markup. Anyone can create a website using Word these days so it really is a way of separating the professionals from the cowboys.

I always try to make sure websites I create validate, although I will add the caveat that with content editable sites I can’t help what my customers add. For example with shops that use Zen Cart. Validators hate ampersands (&) because they are used in many html tags, so if you want to use an ampersand in your text, then you should be typing (&).

Have a play with the validator and see which companies and developers are really professionals http://validator.w3.org/.

able professionals will take pride in creating Web content using semantic and well-formed markup),

Little tricks

caradore — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:33:55 +0000

After the starting this blog, I obviously had to update my website as this was really replacing the little news column I had. So I thought I would give the whole site a minor overhaul. I had a little trick at the bottom of the page where you could click and change the page background but the other images weren’t that good and didn’t really match the theme so I suddenly struck upon the idea of doing four seasonal images. Then of course, my brain working the way it does, I suddenly thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could write a script to check for the month on the user’s computer and then change the background according to the season? Well a few tears and frustrations later, I managed it. If you don’t believe me you change the date on your computer and reload the page (you may have to close your browser if it has cached). I have mapped Spring to March, April and May; Summer to June, July and August; Autumn (Fall) to September, October and November; and Winter to December, January and February. Of course these only match if you are in the northern hemisphere.

I love little tricks like this and many of my websites have them, just something that makes it a little more fun or interactive. Let me know if you would like something special for your website.