Backlit Creative has just launched a new site! My wife, Erin, is a photographer in the Twin Cities. She shoots wedding, family, engagement and child photography. Check out her brand new site on your computer, smart phone or devices like the iPad.

http://erinbellphoto.com

Tell us what you think with a comment below.

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Well, it is finally here. I have been working on building a new site for a while, and have decided to release it a little early. What’s that called again? Oh yeah, a beta version, if you will. Beta means no one can complain that it looks unfinished, and I have plenty of time to finish the site. Yeah, I like Beta.

I have a lot of projects to add to my portfolio section and lots of little CSS tweaks left to make, so look for those in the near future. I will also be adding sIFR flash headline replacement and the FAUST content delivery technique developed by space150. I’d love your feedback if you would care to share your thoughts, so feel free. I hope you enjoy the new site!

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I’ve had the privilege of being asked to train at the DCTC IT Training Center in Eagan. My first class started tonight and will consist of four evening sessions at four hours each over the next couple of weeks. I’ll be introducing students to Adobe Flash, including best practices and tips on real-world usage on the web. I’m honored to have the opportunity to train for DCTC and look forward to teaching more Adobe classes in the future. If you are interested in taking IT Training classes from the DCTC you can sign up here: needcomputertraining.com. I’ll let you all know of any future classes I’ll be teaching. Cheers!

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I recently had the pleasure of working with MN Resorts as a consultant to assist in building search functionality into their site. After taking a look at what we were up against I decided to use Wordpress to develop the new site.

Now I know Wordpress is not a traditional CMS, but traditional is not my style. Right now, Wordpress operates mostly as a blogging platform. However, in the future, I think that Wordpress will begin to move more in the direction of a general CMS, which is why I thought this would be a great jump start for adding future value to the MN Resorts site.

Essentially, all of the resort listings will end up as “Posts” in Wordpress with categories and tags attached for easy search-ability. All other pages in the site will fall into Wordpress “Pages.” Once the new site is built, MN Resorts will have a very simple interface to work with to make edits as resort listings change.

This is just another creative use of technology to deliver quality and effective results to Backlit Creative clients. If you need some assistance in developing a Wordpress blog, or have other “non-traditional” way of using the software, I’d love to hear about them!

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LevelBrand.com is a brand new redesigned website I just finished for my current employer, LEVEL. This site has been a while in the making and has kept me very busy, which is the main reason my blog has been a little bare recently. LEVEL is a brand and reputation agency in Minneapolis, and I have been there for almost a year working as Interactive Designer.

This new site was a very big undertaking, but I enjoyed every minute of it. And I am excited to share a couple techniques that add to it’s clean design and universally accessibility. The first is sIFR (scalable Inman flash replacement). This technique allows for headlines to be replaced with more interesting fonts that everyone with flash player installed can see. If you do not have flash or javascript enabled, you still see standard web fonts for headlines, so no information is lost. This technique helps to enhance the design of the site, while still allowing those headlines to be coded in HTML to be crawled by search engines for SEO purposes.

The second technique is called Faust (flash augmenting standards). The basic principle of this technique is to create your website using building blocks. First, you start as basic as possible using standards based HTML so all your content is out there for SEO. Second and third, add CSS for styling and javascript to enhance user interaction. And finally, display rich interactive flash content over top of your static HTML for those users who can see it. This technique can be seen in the work section of the site. If you have flash player installed you will see a fade between images as you click through the thumbnails. If you do not have flash, but you do have javascript enabled, you will get the same flip between images only without the fade. This is javascript controlling the transition instead of flash. If you have neither of these, you will be redirected to a new page which will display the larger image. Anyway you look at it, the viewer is seeing content. This is good news for anyone concerned with having a website that is universally accessible. And, all the image and alt tag code is written out in the HTML so search engines can read it as well.

My role in this project included everything besides writing copy. I designed, art directed, and programmed the site. I also took my first hack at developing the site specifically for SEO. The website also features some of my photography from a previous post, and some from around LEVEL’s office space.

Check out the site! www.levelbrand.com

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I recently finished the first phase of a website for my father-in-law’s Christmas tree farm in Clarks Grove, MN. I got the site up just in time for the start of the season and I have heard lots of great things so far. The tree farm is also offering a photo contest in which the winner will receive a free tree next year.

Be looking for a photo gallery and some more filled out information in phase two. Many thanks to Paul Budd and my wife Erin for getting all the photos and copy written for the phase one launch. I encourage you to go check out the website and leave some feedback, I’m always looking for ways to improve design and technical aspects. View the site here: BuddsChristmasTreeFarm.com.

One quick technical note, this site uses sIFR (scalable Inman Flash Replacement). This technique can be seen in the headers on each page. The script font is actually a flash file that automatically replaces the plain Helvetica browser text if you have flash and javascript enabled in your internet browser. If you know how to turn those off, test it out and see what the site looks like without the flash replacement.

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Blue Zones, a health and vitality organization founded by longevity expert Dan Buettner, has asked Backlit Creative to commemorate recently published articles in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA
Today. Buettner’s work has been funded by National Geographic and the National Institutes on Aging, and Blue Zones’ findings have appeared on Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper 360 and the ABC Nightly News. Congratulations Dan and team!

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