January is the time to create your advertising plan for the new year. As a thank you to our clients, we are offering a limited-time print special to help you do just that. And of course, if you're a new client, we're happy to extend this benefit to you as well.

Saxony has won the 2009 W3 Gold Award in the "Green" category. This award is for Saxony’s efforts in creating Aptera Motors’ 2008 website redesign. See the site here: http://www.aptera.com.

Web developers and designers alike cringe at the idea of viewing their work displayed within the IE6 browser, which inevitably fails at displaying pages as they were intended to be viewed.

IE6 is an old browser that is being phased out across the Internet. One of the last things we do before taking sites live is to put in a pop up message that displays only in Internet Explorer 6 that suggests to people that they download Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox in order to be able to fully experience the site.

Due to the modern structure of our Saxony site and its use of tabs and layering, our sites (and most respected developers’ sites) do not look their best in IE6. IE6 was released in August of 2001 and most people (the vast majority of regular internet users) have long since updated their browser. If people really want to experience that site as you and I intend, people need to view it using a modern browser that supports web standards. Just as they would need to adequately view all the leading sites on the web, including Facebook, YouTube, eBay, and many more.

Unfortunately, IE6 is NOT one of those browsers. Designers and developers are no longer investing the time and energy in supporting IE6 when there are other browsers that excel and don’t have any issues and behave as expected. People would have been adequately notified by their computer updater (long before they ever get to your site) that their browser is very outdated, and they have ignored the recommendations to update their browser. So they should be well aware that they are browsing the web with a 7 year old browser (ancient in computer years) that is no longer supported or recommended.

Hopefully, with so many sites no longer supporting it, it will force those whom might still be using IE6 to download a modern, and standards compliant browser, and this will hopefully mean that, soon, IE6 will no longer be used, just like IE5 is now pretty much non-existent, and the web is a better place for it.

Fortunately, Internet Explorer 8 will be available soon (it’s in beta right now) and it’s supposed to be a huge leap forward for Microsoft adhering to World Wide Web Consortium standards. Designers around the world will breathe a deep sigh of relief when IE8 arrives. Although IE7 is better, it’s not without it’s own set of issues.

That said, we urge all web surfers to update their browsers and quit chugging through pages erroneously and clumsily displayed. Hey updates are free and only take a few minutes to download and install! We can’t twist any arms but if we had to recommend a browser at all we’d steer all interested parties to the current version of Firefox.

Color enthusiasts of the world, rejoice! We recently came across a fantastic online design resource called http://www.colourlovers.com. The site is a designer community / blog that monitors the color trends used in ad campaigns, product designs, and throughout the design community. There are literally thousands of color schemes and palates submitted by designers across the globe, which can be viewed, discussed, and used as creative inspiration.

 

If you want to spend time in a universe of hues and patterns, or even contribute your own creations, Colour Lovers is for you. The site is a labor of love, to be certain.