Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Crafting Web sites since 1999

I am a Web designer passionate about creating elegant, inspiring, and usable Web experiences that connect with an audience and fulfull business objectives.

Caught My Eye

Does this remind you of one of your design team meetings?

March 8, 2011

I got a great laugh out of this.

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Entertaining introduction to new feature

October 5, 2010

I like this video explain­ing the new Pri­or­ity Inbox fea­ture of Gmail. It is one of the most enter­tain­ing intro­duc­tory videos that I have seen. The music was fun. It had nice sound effects to enhance the pre­sen­ta­tion. I believe it did a great job of explain­ing the new fea­ture. I think this works well […]

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CMS Light

July 2, 2009

I just fin­ished read­ing Chris Coyier’s arti­cle, The “Light” CMS trend. For those of you who don’t know, CMS stands for “con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.” The con­tent is stored in a data­base and then served up on a page using a pre­de­fined tem­plate. The idea behind a CMS is to allow non-technical peo­ple the abil­ity to […]

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What is a Browser?

June 30, 2009

A very telling video about what the aver­age per­son is think­ing when they use the Web. I lis­tened to an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about this sub­ject on Sitepoint’s pod­cast. I think the rea­son there is con­fu­sion about the dif­fer­ence between a browser and a search engine is the inte­gra­tion of search into the Web browser. Search […]

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Hey, That’s My Site

June 25, 2009

Today, I was read­ing through my RSS feeds and came to an arti­cle, 23 Flour­ish Designs, Part 2 on Inspiredol­ogy. I opened it up, and to my sur­prise, was a par­tial screen­shot of big-break.com, a site that I designed at the end of 2008. Thanks for the honor, Inspiredology.

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Beyond the Web site

June 4, 2009

Yes­ter­day after­noon, I received this email from raysbaseball.com. I had bought tick­ets over the week­end to see today’s game. I was really impressed with the infor­ma­tion in this email. It told me about the start­ing pitch­ers for both teams and had links to rel­e­vant sta­tis­tics. There were also links to infor­ma­tion about vis­it­ing Trop­i­cana Field. […]

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Texture, Color, and Detail

February 18, 2009

This Web­site caught my eye yes­ter­day as I was look­ing through entries on CSS Mania. I posted this screen­shot on Flickr. I did a pretty exten­sive com­men­tary on Flickr in the sum­mary and using the notes fea­ture to point out dif­fer­ent ele­ments on the page. What I really like about this site is the sense of […]

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Running on Empty

August 22, 2008

This car­toon from My Life in a Cube says it all for me today. I like the dif­fer­ent medi­ums that this car­toon­ist uses and how they help com­mu­ni­cate his mes­sage. The Red Bull can is very appro­pri­ate for this cartoon.

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Archiving the Internet

April 16, 2008

I found out about this site today, Inter­net Archive. It archives the code so if you no longer have the images in on your domain, then you will not be able to get a full page archive. It is an inter­est­ing idea. I found out about the site in a dis­cus­sion with my team leader […]

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What can brown do for you?

November 9, 2007

I found this site through Design Melt­down, a gallery of design styles. This site is a good exam­ple of nice design which gets rec­og­nized by a gallery but has some usabil­ity issues when you actu­ally use it. First, You have to go to the top right to a “home” graphic to link back to the home […]

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Connecting to Real Experiences

October 30, 2007

I came across Bald­win Wallace’s Web site as I was thumb­ing through Step Into Design mag­a­zine at Barnes and Noble. This is another exam­ple of a trend I have seen in col­lege Web sites. This site is draw­ing you into the world of being a stu­dent at Bald­win Wal­lace. Jared Spool clas­si­fies this kind of content […]

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Sundance Film Festival Site Design

October 11, 2007

I came across the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val site from Cameron Moll’s Pre­mium Link­age. I liked the design of the site. There are sev­eral ele­ments that I found inter­est­ing: Right nav­i­ga­tion on the sec­ondary pages Over­hang­ing graphic on that nav­i­ga­tion bar that indi­cated “you are here” Col­ored drop down boxes of links on the hor­i­zon­tal nav­i­ga­tion bar. […]

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Helpful, Practical Feature from AirTran

August 22, 2007

Last week I booked a flight to Boston for Novem­ber using the Air­Tran. On the last page of the process, I found a fea­ture that I really liked. It gave me the option to import both my depart­ing flight and return­ing flight into Out­look. All the infor­ma­tion that I needed to cre­ate a cal­en­dar event […]

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Biola’s Perspective Student Web site

June 21, 2007

Yes­ter­day, I came across Biola’s Per­spec­tive Under­grads Web site. I like the style of the design and I am guess­ing that it appeals well to the site’s intended audi­ence. But not only is it a nice visual design, I believe the site is designed well for use­abil­ity. I found that the infor­ma­tion on the on […]

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I Could Have Used This in Architecture School

June 17, 2007

This site caught my eye both from a design stand­point and because of the prod­uct it sells. I sat through many design “crits” as an archi­tec­ture stu­dent. This prod­uct would have been very use­ful. I can see using in my office with some of the stools that I like to use on days I feel like […]

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The “Experience” of Martha Stewart’s New Web site

April 5, 2007

I saw Martha Stewart’s new Web site for the first time tonight. I was pretty impressed by what I saw. The site takes advan­tage of Flash video, sIFR, and Javascript­ing that all con­tribute to expe­ri­enc­ing the Martha Stew­art brand online. You can take a tour of the new fea­tures which uses Flash video. It combines […]

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New Yahoo Homepage

May 16, 2006

Yahoo has a new look for their home­page. You can pre­view it at yahoo.com/preview. I like how they are using AJAX to make the page inter­ac­tive and to change the con­tent in the first “box” (with head­line, ‘Make Your­self at Home’) with­out the page refresh­ing. When you click on the four dif­fer­ent tabs, dif­fer­ent content […]

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