The Gifted Resource Center of New England

Toon Girl

I just finished a complete  web site redesign for  the Gifted Resource Center of New England which is located in Providence, RI. The new site details services offered at the GRCNE, features articles by Deirdre V. Lovecky, Ph.D., and provides links and resources for the parents of gifted children, as well as for the children themselves.

The new site design is based on a 960 grid system, which streamlines web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants, 12 and 16 columns; I used the 12 column version for this site.

Since the GRCNE provides services to gifted children and their families I developed a “family friendly” look and feel for the site. The color scheme is bright and cheerful, with a playful header produced with Adobe Flash with Actionscript 3.0, and colorful cartoon illustrations of children sprinkled here and there around the site. The cartoon illustrations were created in 3D with Poser from Smith Micro using Art Materials’ specialized toon shaders. Pre and post production work was done in Photoshop. The CSS was customized for the fonts on the site, and search engine optimization (SEO) was an important consideration in the redesign.

Rhode Island Advocates for Gifted Education

Rhode Island Advocates for Gifted Education

I’ve been updating the design of the RIAGE.org web site in xhtml in between other projects. I want to complete the updates before our meeting with Deboral Gist, RI’s new Commissioner of Education. I only have a few more pages to finish up. Overall, I’m much happier with the look of the site now.

I cleaned up the logo in Adobe Fireworks, and made structural changes in the layout of the pages, and the CSS (cascading style sheets) in Dreamweaver.  SEO, (search engine optimization) should be greatly improved with the reworked navigation and tags. I added some of the fun CSS 3.0 features like rounded corners on div borders and drop shadows on some of the text. Of course, as of this writing you have to be using Opera, as your browser to see the CSS drop shadows, and FireFox to see the rounded corners on the div borders. Too bad Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t support so many of the CSS tags. Nonetheless, I’m optimistic that newer versions of these web browsers will support those features soon, and in any case, the pages look good even if you can’t see those little added touches!

Welcome to the blogosphere!

Quill pen with black ink

Welcome to the blogosphere!

Dipping a toe in, and testing the water here. Not too chilly… OK, plunge in!

For a visual-spatial person blogs can be pretty intimidating, there so many words, so many opinions. Where are all the images? I’ll have to include a few here and there, otherwise it would seem unbalanced to me.

Illustrator and Photoshop should do the trick.  Let’s start with a nice white feather, suitable for use as a quill pen, cut to a sharp point, and poised above a bottle of India ink ready to scratch some thoughts on a page. (You can’t see the bottle; use your imagination. It’s more fun that way.) OK, we’re all set.

Now, what to write?