The Design Rests

Orlando-based law firm Bogin, Munns & Munns needed to overhaul its outdated website. Steam Studios was contracted earlier this year to produce a website that promoted an image of professionalism and vast experience with the law, while incorporating a modern look-and-feel.

From the onset, research and brainstorming were performed by Steam Studios to determine how best to "modernize" the law firm's look without sacrificing the tradition and experience it possessed. A silver and blue color scheme became the backbone of the site, while quotes from famous philosophers and great thinkers were paired with images of traditional law objects. Content was spread throughout the site, in an easy-to-navigate path, with Bogin, Munns & Munns' two main practice areas, Commercial Law and Personal Injury, highlighted for immediate access to viewers.

So what's the verdict? On the charges of excellent brand implementation, web design and the merging thereof, we find Steam Studios guilty! (Oh, man... that was bad. Some jokes really are a crime, huh?)

Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Steve, that's who!

We here at Steam Studios are known for our tongue-in-cheek jokiness, but we assure you, dear readers, this is NOT A JOKE! Steam artist Steve McCain will be one of a handful of contestants on this year's "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" Movie Week Edition. If you know Steve at all, then you know that he's a walking depository of useless movie trivia knowledge. Interpretation? Steve is gonna rock the house on this one! He flies out to New York on October 28th for a shot at a million dollars, a kiss on the cheek from Meredith Viera, and a plethora of frayed nerves. Wish him luck!

In other news...The newest addition to the Steam Studios family, Sebastian Victor Cranford, was welcomed on May 22nd, 2007. Proud parents Samson and Vanessa Cranford couldn't be more thrilled with their new beautiful, bouncing baby boy. Check out some pics of the happy family and revel in the adorableness.

Screwy HTML code

Nothing's more frustrating than viewing the web page that you've been coding for the last four hours and seeing... gibberish. Now, don't go throwing your computer against the wall just yet. We're here to help.

Take a deep breath and ask yourself: "Have I checked my ampersands and curly-quotes?"

See, even though Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is used to write all of the copy you read on the web, that copy has to be written a certain way. And as you while away hours upon hours coding, it's easy to get sloppy. So if you see weird characters and other stuff that shouldn't be there, check out these possible offenders first:

Ampersand Commands
Ampersands do not usually exist by themselves in HTML code (exceptions being meta information, links and comments), because an ampersand denotes "something special".

When your browser scans a web page's code line-by-line it is constructing a page that you can see. Tags, anchors, tables, etc. exist in that code, giving shape and functionality to your page. When your browser encounters an ampersand, it looks for a snippet of code following the ampersand in order for it to properly render out the special character that it expects to be there.

So if you wanted to write out the following:
Bogin, Munns & Munns

you would type this into your HTML code:
Bogin, Munns & Munns

Your browser sees the ampersand "&", then sees the code snippet next to it "amp" (meaning "put an ampersand here") and the semicolon ";" (which ends the code snippet) and knows that what you want your viewers to see is: Bogin, Munns & Munns. If all you have is the ampersand by itself, your browser will do a "best guess" and insert whatever weird character it feels like. If you don't add the semicolon, thereby finishing the code snippet, all of the following text on the page could be rendered in gibberish.

Rich Text
There are two kinds of people in the world: Elvis fans and Beatles fans. Following that same train of thought, there are two kinds of text in the digital world: Simple text and Rich text.

Simple text is bare bones, no-frills, NON-FORMATTED text (think TextEdit on a Mac or WordPad on a PC). Rich Text is frilly, pretty, FORMATTED text (think Pages on a Mac or Word on a PC). HTML code is written in simple text, but thanks to the ubiquity of apps like MicroSoft Word, rich-text characters and symbols have a way of sneaking into your code. This usually happens when you're cutting and pasting text from a Word .doc into your HTML editor. Before you know it, your HTML editor, which isn't prepared to handle rich text, is chock full of curly quotes (only straight quotes in simple text!) and curved apostrophes. And, like the stand-alone ampersands, a browser will freak out when encountering rich text and we'll get the "best guess" and weird gibberish.

If it sounds like a lot of work to check every single line of code, have no fear: Apps like Site Soap can clean up all of your sloppy code for you, and viewers to your websites will see only what you want them to see.

Uncle Stevie wants you...

...To stump him with your favorite movie trivia tidbits! In preparation for his domination of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" Movie Week Edition, Steve needs all the help he can get.

Obscure facts (The first film to ever have a red carpet premiere was 1938's "The Adventures of Robin Hood"!), Movie minutiae (The opera that Julia Roberts and Richard Gere attended in "Pretty Woman" was "La Traviata"!), Celebrity tidbits (John Wayne's real name was Marion Morrison?!)... it's all good. So hit 'em up already! Send all questions and weird factoids to steve@steamstudios.com. You might just help Steve become the millionaire he was always destined to be!