Today, January 18th, is a day of internet strike against censorship. Next week Congress is voting on one bill that will pass internet censorship in the U.S. There are two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, that would largely affect Americans’ access to information online. These bills would put companies like GetCreative in legal trouble if we linked to a site anywhere online that had any links to copyright infringement (source).

The protection of copyright is very important to us and we take efforts to ensure that any information supplied by our clients is attained legally. The way Congress wants to enforce these rules, however, goes beyond copyright protection and infringes on the core rights of us as U.S. citizens. To read more about SOPA and PIPA, visit the sources below. To contact Congress, click here.

Fight For The Future

SOPAStike.com

American Censorship Page

Censorship Infographic

SOPA on OpenCongress

PIPA on OpenCongress

The Oatmeal on SOPA (NSFW)

The List: Sept. 30th Edition

From clients…

-With football season in full swing, these adorable tailgate accessories from Shear Image are hard to resist

-Looking for a job in Richmond? The Halligan Bar is holding a job fair for positions at their new location this weekend

-The People’s Blues of Richmond are playing tonight in Savannah, GA, and Saturday at the HOGTOBER BBQ Festival in Richmond

-Global Explorers is undergoing a website makeover, preview available here

On the internets…

-Wall Climbing Kitty is hilarious, but that can’t be good for the wall

-This soup from Smitten Kitchen is genius: French Onion meets Tomato Soup, be still my heart

-While a little outdated now, this episode of This American Life offers an eye-opening look at the downfall of the economy

-The results are in: view the stats unveiled by this year’s Freelance Industry Report at Freelance Switch

-The new Kindle is out and it looks lovely. I am in love with my Kindle Keyboard

Random favorites…

-I have been exploring the coffee shops of Toronto; Timothy’s Apple Chai Latte is my new seasonal beverage of choice

-Remote Desktop Connection has been a lifesaver and a blessing while working from out of town

-Having someone make my bed is worth the hassle of planning my morning around the cleaning lady’s ever-changing schedule

-I got creative outside the office last week, making these wedding-themed corn hole boards (and bags) for a friend

Have a suggestion for The List? Let me know via email: ESpontarelli@GetCreativeWebDesign.com

Using HTML and CSS3, Flexbox allows for a flexible (hence the name) layout that is easily adjusted based on content. You choose whether you want the items in your layout box to be arranged vertically or horizontally, and then give each box a numerical size. The size is relative to the other boxes, and will adjust automatically to fill the width or height of your layout. See below for an example of three horizontally alligned boxes with sizes of 2, 1 and 3, respectively.

At this time Flexbox is still fairly experimental and is only working consistently in webkit browsers. To learn more and create your own flexible layouts, visit the Flexbox Playground. There you will find visual examples of Flexbox as well as the CSS code that makes it all happen.

Microsoft’s PowerPoint is a program that, for me at least, conjures up bad memories of monotonous High School presentations. Presentations that, no matter what the subject, all used the same old ambiguous backgrounds time after time. Today I have a roundup of PowerPoint designs that break the mold in the best of ways. These unique and interesting designs will take any presentation to the next level, and maybe even keep your audience engaged! Check out some great sources and how to make your own PP Design below.

WorkAwesome: 20 Free PowerPoint Templates that Don’t Suck
This is a collection of 20 great PP Designs, ranging from modern and edgy to more traditional. And they’re all FREE!

Free Power Point Templates
Like the name suggests, this website is fully devoted to Free PowerPoint Templates. You can browse by category, color or tags to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Microsoft Office: Create a design template
This is the official Microsoft tutorial on designing your own PP theme. It gives step-by-step instructions on how to create and edit your own design.

Design Shack: 10 Tips for Designing Presentations That Don’t Suck (Part 2 Here)
This two-part series goes over the basics of presentation design and how to create or pick one that is both visually interesting and appropriate for your audience.

GetCreative Web Design is now a Better Business Bureau Accredited Business.  We know how important your website is to you and your business, which is why we make it a priority to be a reliable company that you can trust. To reassure you that we are a dependable resource for your graphic and website needs, we proudly display this BBB seal.

Companies accredited by the Better Business Bureau must meet their Standards for Trust:

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, readers! In honor of this Black Friday, I have a deal I wanted to let you all know about. Another blogger and friend of mine posted about Shutterfly recently and the sale they are having on holiday cards. They have a nice selection of photo cards, from sweet and whimsical to elegant designs. See below for some great offers and examples of designs that you can choose from.

Anyone with a blog can receive 50 free holiday cards, now until December 31st. Or, if you’re not a blogger you can still get 30% off your cards until December 1st. For free shipping on orders over $25 use the code SHIP25 until December 1st. So, as you continue your holiday shopping don’t forget to order your holiday cards early.

If you would like a unique holiday card designed by GetCreative, contact us by December 10th. We offer one-of-a-kind designs and can incorporate any photos and text of your choosing. Happy Holidays from GetCreative!

In the spirit of Halloween I thought I’d share some blogs and websites that are good for a few laughs. It’s important sometimes to step away from your work and enjoy a few stress-relieving chuckles. Some of these sites may be NSFW, so enjoy these over the weekend.

Someecards.com is a collection of ecards with witty remarks and old-fashioned animation. Users can create their own cards or browse existing cards on the site. There are cards for every occasion for those with a sense of humor.

xkcd is a comic for the nerd in all of us. The creator went to my husband’s high school and has a degree in physics. His simple stick-figure characters bring a bit of nerdy humor to everything from love to pop culture to history and more.

The Oatmeal is an animated blog by a fellow web designer exploring his biggest pet peeves and favorite topics in the form of comics, quizzes and stories. From grammatical clarifications to random facts about cats, The Oatmeal is immensely entertaining.

Hyperbole and a Half is another web comic, by the hilarious Allie Brosh. It is really just a collection of freakish real life stories told in the author’s weird and crazy manner of storytelling with words and pictures created in MS Paint.

Cracked, PhotoshopFail and Cake Wrecks are a few more worth visiting in your spare time. Happy Halloween, everyone!

Sometimes it seems no matter how many computer programs I have, my clients always manage to have different ones. And not just different versions of the same programs, but programs that result in unique file types that I can’t even open with the many programs I use. Microsoft Publisher documents (PUB) are the type I come across most frequently that I am unable to utilize. However, my clever husband introduced me to a helpful website that converts files into PDF documents and delivers them via email, thus solving my file format dilemma.

PDF Online converts not only Publisher files, but also Word, Powerpoint and Excel, we well as web and photo files. The full list of supported file formats includes DOC, RTF, PPT, PPS, XLS, MHT, TXT, PNG, JPG, BMP, TIFF, WMF, EMF and GIF. There is also the option to take a PDF and convert it quickly into a Word or HTML file. This simple and easy to use site has been a great time saver and makes the client-designer relationship that much easier.

I first blogged about the wonders of HTML5 back in May, and I think it is time for an update. There has been progress both in the available features and browser support for HTML5. With these new features there have also developed a number of tutorials and facts to aid in modern web development. Read on to for some of the best HTML5 resources that I have come across so far.

Browser Support
In the “race” towards HTML5 and CSS3, there are some clear winners when it comes to browsers. For a rundown of who’s doing what, this site lists specific elements supported by each of the major browsers, both today and in the future. CanIUse.com allows you to search for specific features and will tell you which browsers support them. It is clear that Chrome and Safari are the leaders so far, with Firefox and Opera making progress and Internet Explorer lagging behind.

To see how your own browser measures up without all of those extra stats, take this browser test. It automatically scans your browser and scores it based on 300 possible points. My browsers’ scores were as follows- Firefox 3.6: 139 with 4 bonus points; IE8: 27 with 0 bonus points; Chrome5: 197 with 7 bonus points.

How-To
For all the details and tutorials about using HTML5 successfully, there are a number of helpful resources. The W3C site is the official site for HTML5 info; for something a little less formal you can check out HTML5 Doctor. Smashing Magazine has a good tutorial titled ‘Coding A HTML5 Layout from Scratch‘, and this Sitepoint article is also helpful. For more details on what you can actually do with HTML5, you can also check out my original post on the subject.

Examples
To see HTML5 in action, here are two great collections of modern websites. Remember that these sites will be best viewed in an updated browser, specifically Chrome or Safari. HTML5Gallery.com offers some great aesthetic sites showcasing some of the newest features. HTML5Demos.com allows you to choose the feature you’d like to preview, and then it takes you to a live demo of that feature.

More Resources
HTML5 Rocks – A comprehensive site full of helpful tutorials, examples and code descriptions.

Dive into HTML5 – An ebook by Mark Pilgrim, who has authored other books on Python and Greasemonkey (Or try its printed counterpart, HTML5: Up and Running)

The above image is the new GetCreative 404 page. The page includes a number of elements that should be included in an error page for the convenience of your viewers. Since not all web users are familiar with the ’404′ terminology, it should be obvious right away that the page reached is an error page. In our case, the big ‘Whoops!’ says it all. An appropriate visual image or drawing can help to make light of the situation, while still acknowledging the inconvenience caused to your website users. Finally, it is important to address why a person has landed at this page and how to proceed. You should avoid placing blame on the user, and instead offer a few explanations for the error. If your site has a search bar it would be wise to include it on this page to help the user find what they’re looking for. Otherwise, direct viewers to use a navigation bar or sitemap to get back on track. It is important that visitors feel welcomed and encouraged to continue using your site, so that they do not take their browsing elsewhere.

You can be as intricate or as simple as you want in your 404 page design, just be sure that it is an accurate reflection of your site. For some creative examples, view this round up of custom 404 designs. No matter how great your error page is, though, eliminating errors that users may encounter while browsing your site should always be the priority. If you know of external links that are outdated and broken, be sure to contact the appropriate webmaster to have those links updated. Of course the same goes for your own site; if you change the name of a page or update a photo then links should be adjusted accordingly.

Once you complete your 404 page design, it is time to upload it to your server. Name your 404 page ‘notfound.html’. Then, access your hosting server and find the .htaccess file. If none exists, create one. (Be careful to name the file ‘.htaccess’, not htaccess.txt or htaccess.html.) The .htaccess file can be opened in a text editor or in Dreamweaver; once you have access to the file add the following line of code: ‘ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html’. Save and upload your .htaccess file as well as the notfound.html page and you’re done! If you have trouble accessing the .htaccess file on your hosting account, this page has helpful information for further instruction.

As always, leave a comment or send an email with any questions and we are happy to help. Or, GetCreative can create a custom 404 page for you that integrates seamlessly into your site- just contact us to get started.