Posts Tagged ‘design’
by Jonathan Bailey on October 26th, 2011
Halloween is less than a week away and it’s officially crunch time for all things horror-related. If you celebrate Halloween, there’s a good chance that you are either looking to or already have checked out a haunted attraction in your area.
But while haunted houses and other haunted attractions can be a good and scary time, they’re also businesses. Like most businesses, they need to have a Web presence to promote themselves, pass out critical information and, most importantly, interact with potential customers 24/7. Also like most businesses, haunted attraction sites have a particular style associated with them.
This style is determined by a large number of factors including the nature of the business itself, especially how seasonal it is, what customers are usually looking for in a haunted attraction and the relatively limited number of design firms that work on these sites.
However, in that style there are a lot of great lessons for other webmasters, including bloggers. While this is definitely a broad generalization, as someone who has visited dozens, if not hundreds of haunted attraction websites, not counting the site for the one I operate, I see a lot of things that these sites do right and a lot of things they do wrong.
As such, here are my lessons that everyday bloggers can glean from haunted attraction websites, including both the things everyone should emulate and the mistakes to avoid. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense
Tags: blogging, branding, design, flash, haunted attractions, haunted houses, Navigation
by Franky Branckaute on July 6th, 2011
WordPress, which was just released in version 3.2, has always been at the forefront of creative design and we continue to see many great WordPress designs. Too often WordPress designs are immediately recognizable because of the linear, blog home page. For this entry we looked for greatly designed home pages of sites using WordPress.
OctavoDesign
The very bright and colorful homepage of octavo designs is all about scrolling. Not only does the main image scroll down when hovering over it, the whole home page does scroll horizontally.
If you don’t believe this site is made with WordPress, check the source code. Read More
Categories: Blog Design, WordPress Themes
Tags: design, Home page, wordpress, WordPress Design
by Jonathan Bailey on June 22nd, 2011
Very quickly, if I visit your blog, will it stand out and be memorable to me? Will it separate itself from any of the sixty blogs created in the last minute? What about any of the more than 86,000 that will be created today? What about the more than half a million created this week?
If your blog is going to succeed, it has to stand out and be something other than “Just another WordPress (or other blogging system) blog”. Doing that, however, isn’t very easy not because it’s difficult to give your site a custom identity but because, with so many other sites out there, it can take a lot of work to give your site something that no one, or almost no one else, has.
However, if you don’t do it, you risk your good work and your energy going to waste, getting lost in the endless and faceless crowd that is 99% of all blogs created. For your site to succeed, it must have a “face” and a unique presence, something you’re not going to get without rolling up your sleeves and getting a little bit dirty with your theme, logo and your domain.
It might be intimidating if you’ve never done it before, but it isn’t half as scary as having millions of twins out there, ready to take your blogging identity in a heartbeat by sheer accident alone.
Read More
Categories: Blogging: How To
Tags: blogging identity, Blogging Pitfalls, design, domain, logo, template, theme, wordpress
by Jonathan Bailey on May 18th, 2011
Imagine, for a moment, that you were invited over to a friends house to watch a movie or catch up on their news. However, instead of giving you what you went for, they bombarded you with advertisements you didn’t want, practically shoving them in your voice and begging you to read them.
Then, when you get past the ads, they start annoying you with irritating sounds and distracting movement, anything to get your attention away from whatever it is you visited for. Then, when you finally turn to leave, your friend does everything they can to prevent you from going. This includes locking doors, rearranging the furniture and everything short of handcuffing you to a wall.
This person, almost certainly, would not be your friend much longer and it is even more unlikely you’d ever go back to their house. At the very least you’d consider this a bad experience and, at worst, it would feel like a form of kidnapping.
However, as extreme as this example sounds, it’s exactly how many websites treat their visitors. Sadly, many webmasters don’t see their visitors as guests in their virtual home, but rather, like sheep meant to be shorn and exploited as much as possible.
But while we can all recount the terrible experiences that we’ve had with sites that have tried to trap and bombard us, there are other, more subtle ways a webmaster can impose on a visitor and they can be just as deadly to earning trust.
Unfortunately, many webmasters fail to realize that they are doing it and some are left wondering as to why so few of their visitors ever come back. Read More
Categories: General
Tags: Advertising, blogging, design, javascript, loading time, speed
by Franky Branckaute on December 19th, 2010
Add Span Tags to Tiles: a rather interesting plugin by Ryan Hellyer of PixoPoint. The plugin does little but what it does might be useful designers and fans of technicolor sites. Read More
Categories: Linking, WordPress Plugins
Tags: Colours, CSS, design, Ryan Hellyer, titles
by Jonathan Bailey on December 8th, 2010
It wasn’t that long ago that starting up a website required a great deal of expertise, time and commitment. There was a reason that those who created sites in the early days of the Web were stereotyped as “dorks” and “nerds”, it was because you had to know HTML, the ins and outs of site construction and at least a decent amount about how the Web worked just to get a basic site off the ground.
However, for Web development, the march of technology has been toward simplicity and ease of use. Blogging and Web publishing in general are both more approachable than ever. Not only can one set up a Facebook account in minutes but they can do the same with a WordPress.com account or a Tumblr blog as well.
In short, anyone who wants to publish a blog can easily do so and almost no experience is required, just the ability to fill in a short form and write some new content.
But this doesn’t mean we’ve gotten away from HTML and CSS being a requirement for creating a successful site. Not knowing these languages can be very detrimental to your site and not only keeps great content from finding the audience it deserves, but can actually cripple your site in ways you can’t predict.
Simply put, if you don’t know HTML and CSS, at least to a minimal extent, you are holding your blog back and gambling with its future.
Read More
Categories: Blog Design, Blogging Resources, Blogging Tips, WordPress Themes
Tags: Code, CSS, design, html, templates, Themes, widgets, wordpress
by Franky Branckaute on November 24th, 2010
WPZoom released a free set of icons for designers and developers. The icons are designed by David Ferreira and available in .PNG, .AI and .PSD format. The icon set features most common icons, also social media buttons, and is rather complete for most uses. A preview of the set posted below.
The set can be downloaded for free at WPZoom.
Categories: Blog Design, Linking
Tags: David Ferreira, design, free social media icons, Freebies, Icons, WPZoom
by Franky Branckaute on November 10th, 2010
BusinessLogs is Splashpress Media’s popular design studio. In the game since many years already, the crew is responsible for popular designs such as Freelance Writing Jobs, ForeverGeek and Search-Plugins.com.
Categories: Directory
Tags: design, Weblogs Design
by Franky Branckaute on January 19th, 2010
Recently Ajay D’Souza asked how we made our author archive pages here on BloggingPro. I personally am a big fan of displaying content differently on different sections of blogs and also think that archives should be more informative than be just a collection of excerpts.
Because I personally believe that an ‘Author Information’ block below every entry overkill is, the author archive is the right spot to display more information about every author and also display the entries written by authors in a short and concise way.
Part 1: Adding The Author Description and Gravatar
Creating customised author pages is really simple. Other than some CSS customisation the code for the author description is entirely provided by known and documented WordPress template tags and information gathered from the author profile.
First we need of course a author.php template for this to work and you need to make sure that every author fills in their profile. The code used in following code samples is backwards compatible (to WP1.2!) and makes use of the $ curauth functions documented in the WordPress Codex Author Templates. The email address is protected from spam harvesters. Read More
Categories: WordPress Tips, WordPress Tutorials
Tags: design, Themes
by Mark McWilliams on January 18th, 2010
This is a guest entry by Mark Mc Williams. Mark is known in the WordPress scene as @wpkid. In this entry he discusses the new page template options in WordPress 2.9.
With the
release of WordPress 2.9 it brought in many new features, but a couple in particular I quite liked, and think they’d be very useful when building client websites or working on your own. Not just that, but out of every other release post, I never saw this mentioned once.
Up First The category-slug.php Template
Before it was added, all you had available was the standard category.php template file which we’re all aware of, along with category-id.php which would have been used by some developers if they needed to show different layouts for each category archive. The trouble starts though if you’ve got 2 or 3 files like category-2.php, category-30.php and category-17.php then it get’s a little confusing if you forget what ID goes with which category! Read More
Categories: WordPress News, WordPress Tips
Tags: design, Guest Post, wordpress, WordPress 2.9
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