December 28th, 2009
After two to three months of working out a new design, I am finally back with a new design. Some of the goals that I had when creating this design were:
- make the design clean as possible
- make the text clear and readable
- lighten up the design (this was my main goal)
- use wordpress to power the site
Why Wordpress?
The main reason for the new design was to switch my blog over from rapidweaver to wordpress. I have been using rapidweaver for about two to three years now to power my blog while creating the rest of the pages in Dreamweaver. While I have been meaning for sometime now to bring all the pages together in wordpress I just didn’t have the time to port everything over to wordpress. Finally when rapidweaver would not accept my serial for some odd reason I thought it was time to switch.
Design, Code, Repeat.
One of my biggest dislikes from my previous design was how dark the whole site was, so that was the first thing I fixed. I redid the whole color scheme using white and green instead of red and black to give the whole site a lighter and more informal feel. Also my old design always felt really cramped so I originally decided to widen the whole page out and use tons of whitespace, that just didn’t feel right. So I compromised with a little bit more space in between the text and the border. The final big change was I decided to use as much CSS3 as possible, the reason for this was: one – it makes the whole site forward looking, unlike like alot of sites that still cater to older browsers and two – it was easier to use than many popular hacks, and does not require javascript to work.
Future Bound…
There are still some ideas that I would still love to play around with someday as well some surprises planed. As far as some topics I would like to cover in the near future are:
Also if you have any questions or found any pesky bugs that are still around feel free to email me.
Posted in featured, personal, webdesign | No Comments »
December 28th, 2009
In creating this new design I actually took a risk and wireframed the entire site before mocking it up. Some people are very much against wireframing, instead they only mock up a web page in code. While others love to wireframe their website for unity and clarity before actually coding or designing anything.
So what is ‘wireframing’ and does Photoshop count as wireframing?
According to Wikipedia the definition of wireframing is:
A website wireframe… is a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages.
My definition is anything that is created to show the interface of each page the site before the coding. What I mean by this is that Photoshop (unless using tons of layer comps, or multiple documents) is not really designed to layout every page of a website, instead it allows you to create just one general design. Fireworks on the other hand though allows you to use the pages pane to layout changes to ever page.
So to the point, should or shouldn’t I use a wireframe?
It is really up to you, personally I am for it, but as i have learned over the years is each designer has his own set of tools and opinions on each one of those tools. Personally I would highly recommend using a wireframe tool for your site but in the end it is really up to you.
Posted in webdesign | No Comments »
November 5th, 2009
Okay, so who there hates a million different web-browser windows
cluttering up their desktop? Certainly not me, that is why I found
a great workflow based on a trick I learned in a Screencasts Online video. It starts
by noticing that under the “Window” menu there is an
option for “Merge All Windows” this option turns all
the browser windows into one big window with many little tabs. This
is option great but the problem still remains that if you are on a
20” monitor or dual screen setup it can be a hassle to go up
to the top of the main screen and click this little option
every-time so how about a time saving shortcut?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in apps | No Comments »
November 5th, 2009
If you are like me you have met or are a web standards zealt and will say or will tell you in a nutshell it is not worth building a website unless you have validated it 10 times plus adhere to the W3C and meet it’s strictest guidelines
. Ok that maybe this is a little over the top, but none the less you have probably heard something like this said by someone or told somebody this by yourself. One day looking at a site called Modern Life is Rubbish
I noticed an article that was titled web standards don’t matter as much as you think
.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in webdesign | No Comments »
November 5th, 2009
Ever since Wordpress came out I have always wondered why there are so many different CMS’s out there? Well, if you have ever tried to mold an exsisting website in to Wordpress you will understand with me why the are more than one out there, Wordpress is just not that flexible. Many developer’s have tried to fix this problems by making the “content hooks” easier to work with by doing things like making the editable div tag a class with a certain name in it, or creating simple %pathto(‘content’)% tags. While these are okay and a little easier for “code-phobic” designers to work with, they still requires you to fix the code on the actual page. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in webdesign | No Comments »
November 5th, 2009
For all your Launchbar users here is a quick and easy to lock your screen. Launch Lauchbar and type “login” (without the quotes) and you should see a login user icon, from there just push enter and the cool “cube flip” should happen and that locks you computer with the login panel.
Also, if you go down a little farther there is also a log-out script there as well.
Posted in apps | No Comments »
November 5th, 2009
Quick note before you get confused: this tutorial is made for an intermediate web designer as it uses rather advanced code in its’ example. For more information on how to build dynamic content like this in Dreamweaver check out “Dreamweaver CS3: Beyond the Basics” series that you can find at http://bit.ly/O4NA.
Recently I came across a very unique problem when coding my portfolio page: all the pages where written in PHP using an URL parameter like example.php?nc=SHORTNAME (SHORTNAME is defined in the MYSQL table right after the primary key). This makes the page more memorable and bookmark-able. But there was still a problem: how do you create and forward and back link between the many SHORTNAMES? The solution was easier than I originally thought.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in webdesign | No Comments »