I’ll be on vacation until August 31st, so support is suspended for around 1 month.

See you in September!

Lake Sandvox Design now comes with a second, “greyish” design whose name is “Lake (Graphite)”. I fixed a couple of bugs too.

Of course, the new design is included in the Summer Pack too.

With (well deserved!) holidays approaching (just ten more days and I will be at the seaside), I leave you for this summer with an interesting offer for first-time customers: all Sandvox Designs for $29 instead of $54.

You save 25 dollars, so it could be an opportunity to get all the collection even if you already have one of two of them.

The Summer Pack 2010 special offer ends on August 31st.

After three long days of restless drawing and coding, I’m happy to announce that the new version of BehindTheRabbit’s website is now officially online.

My main goal was to redesign just the home page to add some more informations and an easier access to the blog, but I immediately realized that a total redesign was needed. I’m quite satisfied with the result, I hope you will be too.

Orange Rabbit sports a default orange color for header and links, but you can change it to whatever you want. With few lines of code, you can have as many different versions of this design as your fantasy can imagine.

Moreover, you can even differentiate single pages within the same website, grouping them into different sections that your visitor will immediately recognize.

This is how (you need a “Pro” licence of Sandvox): – Read more »

Few months ago I received a support request for Grafite, and I shared some css code to tweak the theme a little bit. The results were good, but still my customer didn’t get what she was looking for exactly.

Most of the times, if use Sandvox, you know that you have boundaries you can’t cross and you’re ready to accept this. But from time to time some requests seem very logical and make me think: “Oh, I should have done this”.

In these cases, I like the challenge and if I’m allowed by my schedule I tweak the design itself and send a private, customized version to my customer (don’t rely on it, it happens quite rarely!). Change after change, checking the results not only on my test websites but also on my customer’s one, I ended up with a totally new scheme which eventually became Grafite Mini.

Well, StudioMacbeth is finally online, so thank you Maria and congratulations! I’m happy we can now share the credit.

As you probably know, a well-formatted web page should use only some specific fonts and this is because the web designer has to be sure that the font used is available on the visitor’s computer. If you create a page and choose “Arial” for your text, your visitor will see that page more or less the same way you see it, because Arial is installed on (almost) any computer.

While many elements of the page (colors, boxes, margins, font sizes and so on) are created by the browser following the instructions found in the css file, to display a specific font family the browser has to ask the OS, because neither it nor the css file have any information on how to draw, for example, an “A” using Times New Roman or Arial: for them an “A” is just an “A”. – Read more »

Programming isn’t an easy stuff usually and people is often scared by even the thought of dealing with some HTML code. Actually, once you get a few basic principles, HTML and CSS turn out to be really easy to understand, create and modify. Moreover, you just need a text editor (like TextEdit on the Mac or Notepad for Windows) to work with them, nothing else.

If you know how an HTML page is designed, you instantly acquire the power to customize it heavily. Sandvox Pro, RapidWeaver and WordPress – the three apps I’m developing for – all let you change their designs somehow, so even if you rely on a third party app for your website you still can make your own changes and gain some more freedom.

I found this introductory video which seems to me the perfect way to start if you don’t know absolutely anything about HTML and CSS: it’s a kind of “Lesson One”. It’s 32 minutes long, all the topics are simply explained and at the end you could even write your own website from scratch all by yourself. There’s a download version too, iTunes ready.

Take a look and have fun:

» CSS-Tricks: HTML & CSS – The VERY Basics

If you put a picture into a text field, Sandvox gives you three options:

• to show it in a line itself
• to show it inline with text
• to make the text flow around it (alongside text), aligning the image at one side of the page

Unfortunately, Sandvox decides if the image has to be aligned on the left side or on the right side of the page.

Actually it’s not Sandvox, is the designer of that specific theme: if you switch theme, you’ll see how each design has its own setting. This choice is made for you and usually is the most appropriated to mantain a good balance in the graphics of your website.

For example, Carbone aligns the floating images to the right side of the page: – Read more »

Few lines to explain what’s going on here and why there’s no update since a while.

First of all, after a couple of really tough years (I think that my main job – psychotherapist – is a strong indicator of economical crisis and of some massive culture phoenomenons and these last years have been really particular for both situations; but that’s another story) I’m quite busy now with my profession. Which is good news. For me, at least. I’m not dropping web design but, of course, priority goes to paying my bills.

Second, in the last year I started to consolidate my too many projects: some of them are now closed or going to be, some merged together, some other are suspended while I figure out where they should be directed to fully express their potential. Sometimes I experiment quietly new solutions (photography, facebook page and so on), not investing too much time in them, just exploring their potential.

This blog is one of them and I still plan to expand its topics but since I have to be very careful to be unobtrusive to people who just wat updates on themes and designs the whole thing has to be prepared with some attention. I’ll be probably working on this in July.

Now about themes: no big news for June, I think you can expect at least a new Sandvox Design in July and maybe that famous port of Grafite to RapidWeaver as well. No news on the WordPress side because I’m not up-to-date enough and version 3.0 is getting closer and closer.

Support is available as always, at the usual conditions, no change about that.

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome, thank you everybody for your support and kindness and see you really soon!