It’s that time again… time to strip down and show off your < body>!

Yep, it is the 3rd annual “CSS Naked Day“, and I am participating this year. I have missed it the past two years, but even though the date changed, I made it this time.

The purpose of CSS Naked Day, which was created by Dustin Diaz in 2006, is to promote Web Standards. It shows off those who work hard enough to code our sites properly, using valid (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure.

While this year I stripped my styles by hand, I think next year I will use Aja Lapus’s WordPress Naked Day plugin for the blog. In just one click (activate it in your plugins area) you can strip down to your markup and show your stuff!

If you missed it this year, make sure you set the date for next year, and help spread the word that Web Standards, and proper markup is the best way to build your site. Who needs pretty clothes when you have a nice < body>.

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This is a neat rap that was posted to one of my groups today – while I am not a ‘huge’ rap fan (though I do like many artists/songs) this one is one that a designer should have in their YouTube Channel:

See it on YouTube here because it is not working when I embed it

I was contacted by Heather, through a referral from my talented friend, Jason Black in the beginning of March. She had a site for her company, Isola Isabella, that was being designed and developed by another referral of hers, and while he was doing a superb job in most aspects of the project, she determined that it may be more beneficial for the look she was trying to achieve to have a female work on her design.

Heather knows her market, and knew the style she wanted – upscale, luxurious and clean. After about a week, I came up with a few ideas, and those have since been tweaked to perfection giving her just what she needed.

This project involved the design of the new look, XHTML and CSS coding, and theming of a 1shoppingcart.com ecommerce package that Heather has chosen for her product management.

ISOLAISABELLA BEFORE:

ISOLAISABELLA BY ZENFUL CREATIONS:

Yes. I found yet another one. This one made me chuckle however as I decided to search upon this text from my front page:

Today, before someone will buy from you, it is almost certain that they will attempt to research your name on the internet.

What the search on that lead me to, just made me think, “WHY in the word would someone copy THAT statement from my content, and publish it on a website as their own? Do they not think ‘I’ would research and catch it, LOL?”

Well, I did and here are my findings:

DATE FOUND: March 10th 2008
OWNER: Thia Denae – webmaster@denaewebandtech.com
URL: http://www.denaewebandtech.com/

Thia took the a combination of my about us page, and my home page and republished it as her home/about page.

She created her Web Design page content by copying the text located in the Word of Mouth information box on my front page, and the left side from the first information box on the front page.

She took my text from my Logo Design page, and republished as her own. Also under her Other Graphic Design, she copied and semi-adapted from my Template Design description on my services page.

Come’on designers – you are ‘creators’ – can you not come up with your own verbage to sell your services? I wonder how her business, since it will be known that researching her will come up with me, and the fact that she plagiarized content, will be once I hit publish on this…………