six03 Studios

September 9, 2011
by Todd
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KHS Hockey

The newest installment of projects brings us to the Kennett High School hockey team. The KHS Eagles, the local high school team asked six03 to come up with something new, using WordPress, that the team could update once we were done and maintain themselves.

The results were this;

A WordPress-driven site, with the responsive design from the stock theme tweaked a bit. Added features are Facebook integration, polls for users to interact with, photo gallery with photos of the team from past and present events, calendar of events for parents/players to follow and a few more plugins thrown in such as a Lightbox gallery for photos and secure contact form among others.

It was our pleasure here at six03 Studios to produce this site and help the team build an identity online that was more of a hockey site and had a hockey feel to it. The content has been cleaned up so that pertinent information is relayed to the public, a site that the team could go in when they wanted to and make the necessary updates to the site in a timely manner and not have to worry about hard-coding everything into the page or have it maintained externally.

Thanks to head coach Michael Lane and the entire coaching staff, players and families for the championships brought to the local area and hope for many more. Hopefully you will all enjoy the site as much as we enjoyed producing it.

August 29, 2011
by Todd
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MWV Mountaineers

A project done by six03 to help the Mount Washington Valley Mountaineers Pop Warner Football team achieve a better online identity. By having a more interactive site and ways for players, coaches, parents and fans to follow the team during the season, the football team now has a site that they can show off and it actually feels more of a football team site than just a website.

During one of the phases of the project, the team Vice President relayed to six03;

“Simply put: you are the man. The site is looking phenomenal. I just sent the link out to a bunch of board members…”

You can have a look yourself by clicking the image below and going over to the MWV Mountaineers website.

The site runs on WordPress, uses the responsive Twenty-Eleven theme and has a number of interactive plugins for visitors to engage in the site and for the team to interact with their fans and visitors.

July 12, 2011
by Todd
1 Comment

The Elements of Content Strategy

So the time has come that I went through and read a book that I purchased long ago, and that book was The Elements of Content Strategy. As the book reads,

“It will not show you how to turn your BA in English into a $100,000 salary in ten easy steps.”

Rather, it is like a “quick-guide” as I would like to call it, to content strategy. The book is a short foray into content strategy, separated into three chapters that pretty much cover what is needed in such a small book. Chapter One, “Basic Principles” starts the book off and warmed me up to content strategy and thinking differently about it. I had never thought about content strategy when doing web work. I was always in the mindset of, “Whatever the client wants, they get. Be finished and let them worry about the content.”

Content needs to be appropriate for what the site is about. It needs to be right for the users and the company. The way the content is presented, structured and what is contains is critical for a successful website. If I sell Frisbees, I’m certainly not going to talk golf clubs.

The chapter touches on context. Emotional, physical and cognitive. Making your users feel like geniuses and giving them what they need (or trying to) and more or giving them the option of seeing more. The chapter also goes through what good content is, and that is certainly an important start to the book, I even picked up on a few things.

So without giving any more of the book away, it is definitely worth picking up/buying and reading many times. Chapter Two is “The Craft of Content Strategy” and Chapter Three is “Tools and Techniques” a very invaluable chapter for me personally to have read.

Overall, the book was a big hit with myself. You’ll have to be the judge of that. All I can say is, that this book certainly shed some light on content strategy, for me and educated me more in what content needs to be, needs to do and how it needs to be projected from any project. Erin Kissane hits a home run with this one and A Book Apart publishes yet another excellent book in a series of useful and wonderful books.

April 3, 2011
by Todd
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A Fix for iPhone Viewport Scale Bug

Shi Chuan has posted an article about the iPhone viewport scale bug over at his site. It is very well worth the read. Shi, along with Jeremy Keith, who had shown concern over the HTML5 Mobile Boilerplate here.

Jeremy first raised his concern (about iPhone viewport scaling) and later by Andreas. My early view was stated here. Since this issue was raised, I have been trying to find ways to work around this problem. Below is a proof of concept of how to preserve the accessibility (scaling) without affecting the usability for the majority.

All we need to do to solve this problem is to dynamically reset the scale factors to default when user zoom the page. Here is a demo: http://www.lab.highub.com/m/scalefix.html

Read the whole article in its entirety here.

You can also check out Jeremy’s follow-up to this, “Orientation and Scale” over at Adactio.

March 9, 2011
by Todd
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CSS3 For Web Designers

Yet another book read, this time, the 2nd in a series of books from A Book Apart called CSS3 For Web Designers, by Dan Cederholm. This book, is great. Dan explains everything that seems to be a little confusing or daunting, and simplifies it and makes it understandable. Case in point, CSS3 multiple backgrounds (for myself anyhow). 120 pages of knowledge from one of the experts. Dan’s simple approach to “web craftsmanship” is refreshing. It’s not one of those 700-page technical manuals or like reading the w3.org specs. It’s broken down, easily understood and simply explained.

If you don’t have this book and want a great read, buy it. If you don’t have it and are learning CSS3, purchase it. If you have it and love it, share your thoughts on the book, and tell a friend to buy it. Top notch effort by a true web craftsman, Dan Cederholm. One of my favorites, whom I have followed for a long time now since I set eyes on Simplebits.

March 5, 2011
by Todd
3 Comments

HTML5 For Web Designers

What can I say? This book was exceptionally written, Instead of having to go through and read the long-winded spec that mainly caters to browser developers, you get a good chunk of the information in this book, you get the gist of the information in 95-pages of “get your hands dirty” reading with “HTML5 For Web Designers”

Hitting valuable and informative points on such topics as Web Forms, Semantics and Rich Media, Jeremy Keith delivers a home run, in my opinion with this book. Anytime I can pick up and read a refresher book or book on emerging web technologies, I will, I’m not one to think I am above needing to look back once in awhile and say to myself, “I think I’ll go read up on ho to code a form.”

This book just solidifies my belief that using HTML (HTML5) now will benefit me and the sites I build in the long run. A Book Apart hits the nail on the head with this release. I look forward to purchasing more releases from A Book Apart in the future!

March 4, 2011
by Todd
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New Project – Caypen Magazine

Just released is a joint venture by six03 Studios and Web 7 Media for Caypen Magazine. Featuring CSS3 tomfoolery, handcrafted HTML and a lot of backend oil, Caypen runs off the WordPress publishing platform and features lots of nifty plugins for MailChimp newsletter signups, ad sponsors, social networking with the magazine, and much more.

Head on over and check it out or go to the “Portfolio” section of this site to read more.

February 13, 2011
by Todd
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Handcrafted CSS

Finally getting around to my review of Handcrafted CSS by Dan Cederholm (@simplebits).

This isn’t the book for the hardcore coder, it’s not the book for the elitist programmer. This IS the book for the developer that wants to pick apart at things and take themselves through a refresher course in some CSS and HTML “lessons.”

The book covers a sample site that Dan made, called “Tugboat.” Taking you, the reader, through the series of steps he took to get the CSS and HTML looking so sharp. Using some methods and explaining them extremely well in the time that he had to do it in, Dan takes you through the steps it took to achieve such CSS3 prestidigitation as rounded corner and transitions, among others.

Guest author, Ethan Marcotte (@beep) takes you through a little bit of responsive web design, fluid grids and fluid images.

The companion video is also very helpful, informative and entertaining, as we get to see Dan play the ukulele at the end.

Overall, the book was a fantastic refresher into new ways of bulletproof web design from one of the masters in the industry, along with a master of fluid grids, images and typography as a guest author. If you’re a seasoned veteran of programming and are looking for a hardcore programming book, this is not your cup of tea.

If you’re always looking to keep up-to-date and get back to basics once in a while, this book is for you, like it was for me.

January 26, 2011
by Todd
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Introducing HTML5

When this book arrived, I dove right in and must say that this is a practical guide on HTML5. It delves into some of the more major topics and does not bore you with too much technicality and code examples. Explanations are crisp and clear, no technical jargon that would even make the most seasoned professional shake their head and put the book down.

Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp are two seasoned professionals that have their heads wrapped around the topics they speak about and write about. The book isn’t a guide where the reader has blinders put on, but has some whimsical jokes here and there that kept me reading and chuckling through the book, which held my attention longer than some of the other books I have purchased on web design and development before in the past.

From the first page to the last, I was left with no questions, just straight answers on topics that picked apart some of the topics of HTML5 that I had been wondering about. This book, not being an in-depth manual on HTML5 satisfies my curiosity and sparks my advancement of research on HTML5, when and how to implement it, and even makes me want to experiment with the technologies that HTML5 offers and create my own web apps.

Content surely is number one when it comes to my purchasing of a book. Introducing HTML5 does this with such “perfection”, it left me wanting more. I also used the companion web site to follow along and try out some of the examples from the book and use the links from the companion site to do further research into topics and read a bit more into each chapter.

Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp do a wonderful job explaining what works, how it works, and what does not work. Briefly going into some detail into what will work in what browsers and how it works in some cases. This made things a bit more clear for me when it came to certain topics like Geolocation and Web Workers.

If there was ever a book that I had anticipated getting and reading, it is Introducing HTML5. If ever there was a book that did not leave me disappointed, but rather left me wanting more and a book I would definitely read again, it is Introducing HTML5.

December 23, 2010
by Todd
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Happy Holidays

Happy holidays to everyone from six03 Studios! Enjoy the rest of 2010 and the beginning of 2011!

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