Main Menu

A List Apart

The Look That Says Book
Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size.
Strategic Content Management
Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?
Apps vs. the Web
There's an app for that, and you're the folks who are creating it. But should you design a web-based application, or an iPhone app? Each approach has pluses and minuses—not to mention legions of religiously rabid supporters. Apple promotes both approaches (they even gave the web a year-long head start before beginning to sell apps in the store), and the iPhone's Safari browser supports HTML5 and CSS3 and brags a fast JavaScript engine. Yet many companies and individuals with deep web expertise choose to create iPhone apps instead of web apps that can do the same thing. Explore both approaches and learn just about everything you'll need to know if you choose to create an iPhone app—from the lingo, to the development process, to the tricks that can smooth the path of doing business with Apple.
Good Help is Hard to Find
Help content gets no respect. For one thing, it is content, and our horse-before-cart industry is only now beginning to seriously tackle content strategy. For another, we assume that our site is so usable, nobody will ever need the help content anyway. Typically, no one is in charge of the help content and no strategy exists to keep it up to date. On most sites, help content is hard to find, poorly written, blames the user, and turns a mildly frustrating experience into a lousy one. It's time to rethink how we approach this part of our site. Done well, help content offers tremendous potential to earn customer loyalty. By learning to plan for and create useful help content, we can turn frustrated users into our company's biggest fans.
Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings
Too many kickoff meetings squander the busiest, most expensive people's time reiterating what everyone already knows. If every meeting is an opportunity, why waste your first one? By asking stakeholders tough questions before the kick-off, and using the meeting itself to explore ideas and build relationships, you can turn a room of mutually suspicious turf battlers into an energetic team with shared ownership of the end-product and the kind of bond that can sustain the group through the challenges ahead.
No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas
You can't create what clients need when you're too busy saying yes to everything they want. As a user experience designer, it's your job to say no to bad ideas and pointless practices. But getting to no is never easy. Proven techniques that can turn vocal negatives into positive experiences for you, the client, and most importantly, the end-user include citing best practices and simple but powerful business cases; proving your point with numbers; shifting focus from what to who; using the "positive no"; and, when necessary, pricing yourself out.
JavaScript Minification Part II
Variable naming can be a source of coding angst for humans trying to understand code. Once you’re sure that a human doesn’t need to interpret your JavaScript code, variables simply become generic placeholders for values. Nicholas C. Zakas shows us how to further minify JavaScript by replacing local variable names with the YUI Compressor.
SVG with a little help from Raphaël
Want to make fancy, interactive, scalable vector graphics (SVGs) that look beautiful at any resolution and degrade with grace? Brian Suda urges you to consider Raphaël for your SVG heavy lifting.

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

Captain's Designs
Apalachicola, FL 32320
850 653 1180

Click and then enter your phone number. Our GoogleVoice account will call your phone and ours to connect us toll free.