You may remain informed as to all of our latest news and events via the RSS 2.0 feed that you will find here!
Industry Recognition Award from Hot CSS Design for Happy Hearts
30 Mar 2010
Over at Express Publishing’s Web Department Nico Haitas who formed part of the development and design team of the new Happy Hearts Microsite have just received another industry recognition award this time from Hot CSS Design. This is our 6th award for Express Publishing’s various websites to date.
This marks a total of seven industry recognition awards to date.
What is Happy Hearts?
It is a FREE English as a Foreign Language micro site for young learners at primary level, complete with downloads, press outs, home activities etc. It is also a FREE resource for teachers of the course as it has many useful resources for them to download. Also the site features an interactive introduction of the characters to the students, for which there is as always an accessibility friendly version below the interactive contents.
Primarily this micro site was developed to reach out to the pupils, parents and teachers of the course.
The Happy Hearts series captures the children’s interest and leads them into a worls of fun and learning!
Why is this important?
Well educational websites are usually very drab and boring, with Happy Hearts (which can be found here… http://www.expresspublishing.co.uk/elt/happyhearts/ ) we have managed to break this stereotyping and come up with a fresh exciting design which is finally made it into a design and code excellence recognition site Hot CSS Design.
Furthermore the site’s handmade code is completely accessible to all, has been tested for colour vision impairment and is super easy to navigate and use meaning a further attraction for the awards. Not forgetting that it has been tested and works in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Flock and Chrome, phew what a mouthful.
What can you do to help?
Please go to Hot CSS Design (which can be found here… http://hotcssdesign.com/4607-happy-hearts.html ) and give Happy Hearts a star rating or you may be a superstar and write your comments for the site’s coding and design. No need to be a specialist to write a comment, but please, you do need to be honest. We use these comments to further improve our site design and development in the future, so that the interfaces may be friendlier and easier to use.
Thank you all in advance!
my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at that end there, not leave it
Thank you for your comment Beate, but there is no decisive insight to this issue as it involves the Browser directly and not any code written by any developer on the other side of the Google Chrome fence i.e. you and I.
As you may know Google Chrome is still in BETA development and as such there is no way to resolve this issue yet, having said that, if I were Google Chrome and I had Feedburner as they do, I would also be in no rush to repair this bug.
In any case I have done some research and I have found a possible way to work around this issue, there is no guarantee that this will work as I have not tried it yet, but if you have the time, give it a go and let us know your outcome. Anyway here goes…
Download SeaMonkey. It’s made by Mozilla, so you know it’s good enough to do most things right, that’s if you do not have it yet.
1. Write your text in Notepad (Please do not use Word as it adds all sorts of code which messes with the RSS).
2. In SeaMonkey, go to File, New, Composer page.
This opens up a new blank page.
3. Right-click and select Paste without Formatting
4. Copy the text you have just saved from the SeaMonkey page
5. Paste into your site.
Basically we have generated a page of text that has absolutely no formatting what-so-ever added to it; the suggestion is that this will allow your RSS to be visible in Chrome.
Please remember that I have not had the time to test this myself and as such offer you no guarantee that this will resolve all of our issues till Google Chrome get their act together. Till then the only solution is to offer both RSS 2.0 and Feedburner in your site giving your visitors a choice of reader rather than no reader with which to follow you by.
As before should anyone know of a better way to tackle this problem or have newer information we are more than happy to try it out.
This is a top quality post. Loving it dude!
Rattling wonderful visual appeal on this internet site , I’d rate it 10 10.
Thank you very much Shanice and Bolf!
Complements are always welcome, especially when the design and development of a site are experimental such as this one.
This blog seems to recieve a good ammount of visitors. How do you get traffic to it? It offers a nice individual spin on things. I guess having something useful or substantial to post about is the most important factor.
Hi Jeneva
Thanks for the comment, but it is not only important to have a good topic to discuss but also how the post is written that also matters. In our twitter account @handmadecss (tweet copied and pasted below) we have a link to a post in econsultancy.com that explains to you how to improve your blog post writing skills and how to best present your message to your site visitors.
From Twitter @handmadecss “Do you write content for your blog or News section in your site then – How to write for the web: 23 useful rules http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/6771-how-to-write-for-the-web-23-useful-rules is 4 u!”
We hope you find this useful, drop us a comment and let us know how you get on!
I have a fan blog. I will add your blog to the blog list as I think my visitors will love to read your posts…