Mar 23

Outsourcing, A Magical Unicorn…

Posted on Monday, March 23, 2009 in General Tips, Web Design

In today’s world when it comes to technology outsourcing is an inevitable option. At first I was a bit skeptical, I heard good things about outsourcing, but I also heard a lot more horrendous stories about how outsourced projects would only be 50% completed and the company or coders on the job was non responsive and not as competent as they led you to believe. I have a relative who recommended RentACoder.com (A place to post a job and company’s/coders will bid on your project) at first this was the last direction I wanted to take, but after having my back in a corner I posted my job just to see how the process works (no strings attached). After finding out that you can view the bidders work history and read reviews past clients have posted I began to drop my walls and thought, maybe this will work out. I immediately set some guidelines:

  1. The coder had to have a rating of at least 9 out of 10.
  2. The coder had to have at least worked for 30 clients.

After a few days passed I narrowed my bidders down to about 5 coders I was interested in (watch out for the, I’ll do it for dirt cheap no question asked guys). I went with the user ‘MOJO Coder’ also known as Josh over at ibot.tv. I went with Josh because he met my guidelines and had the most experience in my particular project. After locking all the funds in escrow (including Josh’s 20% down to insure his performance) work began and Josh was a dream come true. He was that magical unicorn galloping off in the distance coming my way to save me from the code monster…

Through the entire process Josh was EXTREMELY attentive and always there to answer questions, give great suggestions, and complete the work above and beyond reasonable expectations. If you are looking for PHP coding and more specifically WordPress back end customization look no further, Josh is you man (or white magical unicorn…) check out ibot.tv for more info.

So next time you need work done don’t hesitate to outsource, just make sure you do your research on who you are hiring.

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Jan 16

Simple CSS Rollover with A Single Image [Tutorial]

Posted on Friday, January 16, 2009 in Tutorials, Web Design

This will be our final result using only one image. (you can download exercise files at bottom)


“Rollover me!” -says Mr.Elephant
(you can use any image you would like, not just a super cool elephant and zebra…)

How to do this? LET’S GO!

In simple terms: We are displaying only the left side of the image hiding the right half, then on rollover we are moving the image half way over to display the right side.

1. Create an image twice as wide as the size you’ll need. The left side of the image will be the non rolled over image and the right half will be the rollover part of the image.

Below is the original image.
rollover_image(260width x 108height)

2. Below is the HTML code used, make sure it has a class so our CSS code knows where to look. This will act as our CSS placeholder for the rollover image.

<a class=”imageRollover” href=”#”> </a>

3. Now for the CSS that will do the magic. Let’s get the image to look like we want when nothing is rolled over:

a.imageRollover {
background: url(”rollover_image.jpg”) no-repeat; (This is the image to be used 260×108)
display: block; (this will display the entire image)
width: 130px; (display 130px wide, half the size of our image)
height: 108px; (display 108px high)
text-decoration: none; (This takes off the default styles used on links)
}

That will display the left half of our image. Now, we want to move our image 130px (half our image width) to the left to reveal the right side when rolled over.

a:hover.imageRollover {
background-position: -130px 0;
}

This moves our image 130 pixel to the left on :hover (note: background-position: Xposition Yposition)

That’s all there is to a single image rollover in CSS. ENJOY!

>>DOWNLOAD THE EXERCISE FILES HERE

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