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A List Apart

Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need
With a mobile-first responsive design approach, if any part of the process breaks down, your user can still receive a representative image and avoid an unnecessarily large request on a device that may have limited bandwidth. But with several newer browsers implementing an “image prefetching” feature that allows images to be fetched before parsing the document’s body, some of the web's brightest developers are abandoning responsive images in favor of user agent detection, at least as a temporary solution. For us standardistas, UA detection leaves a bad taste in the mouth. More importantly, as the number and kinds of devices continue to grow, UA detection will quickly become untenable—just as browser detection did back in the bad old days before web standards. What's really needed, argues Mat Marquis, is a new markup element that works the way the HTML5 video element works. Sound crazy? So crazy it just might work.
Pricing Strategy for Creatives
Strategic pricing helps your brand and helps you to make more money. Issuing a price is like handing out a business card—it’s a great branding tool, but be careful about what it says to your market. Beginning relationships with customers at a high price makes the statement: “we’re good at what we do and we know it.” Fighting with a competitor over a low price says “I’m uncertain about my abilities, so I’ll take what I can get.” Failing to use a considered pricing policy will leave you treading water in a sea of design mediocrity, allowing you to just stay afloat while you sell commodities. Jason Blumer explains how to become strategic about your pricing—including three things you can do immediately to kick-start your journey toward strategic pricing.
Building Twitter Bootstrap
Bootstrap is an open-source front-end toolkit created to help designers and developers quickly and efficiently build great stuff online. Its goal is to provide a refined, well-documented, and extensive library of flexible design components created with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for others to build and innovate on. Today, it has grown to include dozens of components and has become the most popular project on GitHub, with more than 13,000 watchers and 2,000 forks. Mark Otto, the co-creator of Bootstrap, sheds light on how and why Bootstrap was made, the processes used to create it, and how it has grown as a design system.
An Important Time for Design
Design is on a roll. Client services are experiencing a major uptick in demand, seasoned design professionals are abandoning client work in favor of entrepreneurship, and designer-co-founded startups such as Kickstarter and Airbnb are taking center stage. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that design has a massive role to play in the evolution of the web and the next generation of web products. The result, says Cameron Koczon, is that designers have now been given a blank check—one that lets web designers band together as a community to change the way design is perceived; change the way products are built; and quite possibly change the world.
A Pixel Identity Crisis
The pixel has long been the atomic particle of screen based design: a knowable, concrete unit of measurement. But layouts based on the hardware pixel are fast becoming an endangered species. Even the introduction of a new, W3C standard reference pixel, although it promises stability in the long-term, can't help us navigate the current chaos. Consider the two "standard" pixel definitions and 500 "standard" viewports your user's Android device may support. To create designs that transcend platform differences—the promise of the web and standards—you must normalize pixels across devices. Scott Kellum shows how math and media queries can keep you sane and help you design consistently across platforms.
What I Learned About the Web in 2011
As the year draws to a close, we asked some A List Apart readers to tell us what they learned about the web in 2011. Together their responses summarize the joys and challenges of this magical place we call the internet. We need to continue to iterate, to embrace change, and challenge complexity to keep shipping. Above all, we must continue to reach out to one another, to teach, to support, to help, and to build the community that sustains us.
Say No to SOPA
A List Apart strongly opposes United States H.R.3261 AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it. SOPA approaches the problem of content piracy with a broad brush, lights that brush on fire, and soaks the whole web in gasoline. If passed, SOPA will allow corporations to block the domains of websites that are “capable of” or “seem to encourage” copyright infringement. Once a domain is blocked, nobody can access it, unless they’ve memorized the I.P. address. Under SOPA, everything from your grandma’s knitting blog to mighty Google is guilty until proven innocent. Learn why SOPA must not pass, and find out what you can do to help stop it.
Getting Started with Sass
CSS’ simplicity has always been one of its most welcome features. But as our sites and apps get bigger and become more complex, and target a wider range of devices and screen sizes, this simplicity—so welcome as we first started to move away from font tags and table-based layouts—has become a liability. Fortunately, a few years ago developers Hampton Catlin and Nathan Weizenbaum created a new style sheet syntax with features to help make our increasingly complex CSS easier to write and manage—and then used a preprocessor to translate the new smart syntax into the old, dumb CSS that browsers understand. Learn how Sass (“syntactically awesome style sheets”) can help simplify the creation, updating, and maintenance of powerful sites and apps.

Your Choices

Let The Captain Build It

Captain's Designs, of Apalachicola, Florida, can take care of all your web site design, hosting and site maintenance needs. We can give you a web presence that will help promote your product and business or just put some things that are important to you online to share. We are located in Apalachicola, Florida but can work with you no matter where you are located.

Complex or simple, CMS or HTML, large or small, the choice is yours. Let the Captain handle it all for you.

You Have Choices

We can build you a dynamic CMS database driven site like this one or a more conventional HTML and CSS styled site. You can switch between this CMS site and our own HTML site by using the button just below.

For more detailed articles about the differences between HTML sites and CMS ones, look on the main menu above.

Your Image

Your Image Matters

Your Image means the world to you.
Put your web site in the capable hands of Captain's Designs and we will present your image to the world in the best of all possible ways.

Continue reading to learn about some of the ways Captain's Designs can help you best present your image to the world.

How We Establish Your Image

If you want to start from scratch, often the color scheme is the best place to begin. First we work with you to create a co-ordinated palette for you. If you already have "signature colors", we can help you expand that into a full palette to use throughout the website to give your web presence continuity.

Next, if you don't already have a logo, we will create one using that color scheme and then use your new logo and color scheme to design and build a cohesive web site with a central theme. Read more...

Our Services

Secure Set-Up and Installation

Many new computers arrive already bogged down by excess programs and utilities that you will never need. You never really know how well it COULD work. Known as "bloatware", some of the largest computer builders (Dell, HP, Compaq) are the biggest offenders. Many other new computers are compromised within the first few days before their owners have a chance to learn how to keep them secure.

Why go through that? Let us set up your new computer, streamline it to run at its potential, immunize it against problems, and get you off to a good start.

Viral and Malware Extermination

We do on-site assessment of malware or viral infections. We will come to your home or office and assess the problems with any computer or network and give you good solid advice on how to proceed.

If your computer needs time consuming multiple scans, we can take it back to our "lab" so we can run those scans without having to charge you for all the time it takes to let the scans do their work. We keep up to date on the latest malware released "in the wild" and have a full arsenal of tools at our disposal to root out and defeat the toughest of computer infections.

Our Pricing

Static Sites (HTML)

If it will fit your needs, the least expensive option for a web presence can undoubtedly be a static HTML site. Don't misunderstand, the term "static site" simply means the pages themselves are created and stored on the server and then the user's browser calls up the entire "static" page when it visits the site. A "static HTML site" can still have lots of interesting features, slide shows, and even flash or video features,

Pricing for static HTML sites is fairly straightforward. Like most design companies, we charge per page and then give you an "a la carte" choice of a number of extras..

Content Management Sites (CMS)

Content Management Sites, or CMS, are so flexible, dynamic and scalable that it is impossible to set static prices. If you are interested in a CMS site (and if you want a cutting edge site with maximum flexibility you should really consider one) we will work with you and follow a basic workflow to arrive at a firm contract and price based on the site you want created before we begin.

We will meet with you, find out exactly what you have in mind, work up a mock-up and design ideas, present that to you, set a price for the project, sign a contract with you and move ahead with the design.

Some Demos

We've put together a page on our HTML site of links to demos of some features we have built for various sites. Some flash movies, slideshows, music, video and more elements that will give your pages more interest. Link below left is to demo page, icons link to features on live sites.

Click to view demos