When asked by the owners of McGrath Woodworks to create a website for their business, Chico Web Design’s creativity kicked into high gear! With no previous website or marketing materials, Chico Web Design started from scratch to create McGrath Woodworks brand and image. From business cards, tradeshow banners and truck magnets, to a fully dynamic website.

McGrath Woodworks needed a solution which allowed them to easily update and maintain their own products. We had the perfection solution for them. With our Mavieo Content Management system, we were able to seamlessly integrate their websites look and feel with a graphical administration interface making uploading products, modifying content, and editing categories a breeze.

Launch McGrath Woodworks

Other Design Items

Supporting the community and shopping local is what Made In Chico is all about. They carry products from local vendors through-out the North Valley and what a pleasure it was to work with the owner Jacki to create a new label designs for their new products.

Made In Chico Products are in Green

Published a new website skin for lulus.com today!

After creating a logo & website design, McGrath Woodworks asked us if we did business cards, tradeshow banners, and car magnets.  The answer is yes!  We’ll be placing them in our portfolio shortly.

Getting well underway to a new Blog for LuLus.com!

Every website that we design at Chico Web Design starts as an idea.  Based on those ideas and client interactions, we put pen to paper and begin creating website design mockups.  Depending on the requirements, a full set of design comps will typically begin with a home page and inner content page.  More advanced web sites introduce member sections, payment details, and can go upwards of a dozen or so independent mockups.

Just as a builder draws blueprints, Chico Web Design creates our own set of blueprints for several reasons.

• It’s cheaper and less laborious to make changes in this phase
• It gives the client an idea of what their site could look like without the investment of full development
• Allows for open collaboration between our creative teams and our clients
• Gives us a venue to express our ideas about your business and site
• Sets the tone for the remainder of the pages

As the leading furniture source in the Yuba City and Sacramento Area… read more

Site: www.chicograduate.com
Client: ChicoGraduate.com
Location: Chico CA
Industry: Paid Business Directory

Spotlight: Easy to Maintain and Manage Online Subscription Based Business Directory
Technologies used: PHP, MySQL, XHTML & CSS, Flash, XML, JavaScript

Read More

Years ago, there was only one web browser that mattered, Internet Explorer! I know, shame on me. Today, you say the “IE” word around any web designer and they will cringe with bitter angst due to countless hours spent staring monotonously at their monitor trying to figure out WHAT IS WRONG!

With word of Google Chrome entering into the web browsing market, it really put a sour taste in my mouth. As designers, we follow a specific set of web standards to ensure that our websites will look identical from browser to browser and operating system to operating system. The problem is, with all of the newcomers to the web browsing industry; we have to keep debugging new issues!

Let’s back up a bit. Internet Explorer 6, in its day, was the only web browser to use. Microsoft had a monopoly on the web browsing market, so whatever Internet Explorer did became the standard. Because of this, sites were built specifically for Internet Explorer 6 and did not follow valid HTML rules, and bad code was interrupted as “working” code.

Then comes Mozilla’s Firefox into the equation! Great! Finally a web browser that follows the W3C Standards. Mozilla decided that it was going to follow the proper rules set out by all of the standards boards. Now the fun begins!

So, bring in Firefox 2, don’t forget that every browser will need some sort of upgrade at one point. Now we have Firefox 3! Great, IE 6 is around but don’t worry, IE 7 will maybe kinda sorta help clean up some of those bugs. Oh no, here comes IE 8 which is released in Beta! You also can’t discount all of the new users who have moved over to Apple because they have Safari 2 on their machines which has just been replaced by Safari 3! If you’re head’s not spinning already, don’t worry because now we get Google Chrome, WHICH by the way, is only released for XP and Vista, not Apple. Did I mention Apple iPhones or BlackBerrys?

That was a mouth full!

The issue isn’t that we have a plethora of great new browsers; the issue is that the old disheveled web browsers are still being used.

According to w3schools.com, 24.5% of all users online are using IE 6, as of August.

On a daily basis, we consistently have to code, re-code, hack, and re-hack valid XHTML & CSS to fit every browser across the board. The biggest of which, happens to be Internet Explorer 6.

As a project manager and designer, I can honestly say that for an average website, it can take 6-8 hours to create XHTML and CSS for basic templates. Then, it will approximately take another 2-3 hours, depending on the complexity of the site to get it to work in all browsers, specifically IE 6. We’ve spent countless hours, re-coding for IE6, so much so, I probably don’t even want to know the true number.

We keep adding web browsers to the equation, but haven’t taken any away yet. With 24% of the market using a tool like IE 6, which must be getting close to 8 years old, we’re still forced to find new ways to hack backwards and make them work on old browsers.

Personally, I use Firefox 3 and tend to like it the most. Safari has had some compliancy issues in the past with forms and simple WYSIWYG editors that really turned me off of their browser.

I wish I had a solution and could wave my magic browser wand and get everyone to upgrade form IE 6, but who knows when we’ll get to stop pulling our hair out supporting IE 6.

Can’t we get everyone to upgrade from Internet Exploder 6!

At Chico Web Design we do more then just create visually pleasing web sites. We can handle any of your custom graphic needs. From t-shirt design to 8’ x 10’ trade show booths! Below is a trade show booth design that we created for Research Solutions. This custom designed trade show booth was created to match all of their current collateral and web site design.

Trade show Booth Design Examples