Why Web Designers are becoming WordPress Designers?

17 Aug, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

web10 Until late 90’s, online publishing wasn’t as easy as it is in current times, it was the evolution of Blogger that started to make this space easier for common person who are technically challenged. Although, it were CMSes like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla & various other open source systems that upped the game by giving more power in the hands of publishers at much lower cost as the whole platform is completely free, the only cost involved is customization of the platform and the way content is displayed which is nothing if we compare the power and flexibility we get using these content management systems.

It was the evolution of blogging that brought many significant changes in the web ecosystem and one of them is that there are far more webmasters now and hundreds of them are becoming professional webmasters every day. I personally believe that its that has contributed significantly in this space. Its user friendly, has great documentation and has awesome community around it. is fast becoming the first choice for every publisher, people are shifting on it and this increase in demand is making companies adopt and one of the reason why we see so many companies offering premium templates and companies offering services.

With that, we thought of coming up with a resourceful post that’ll help the new Web designer turned designers in making their lives easy -

Resources for Coding

aptana

WordPress Codex: What can be better than the official codex itself? The documentation itself is wonderful and that is one of the reason why developers were quick to adopt .

WP Engineer: WP Engineer has lots of posts with codes and lots of posts with that are surely going to help beginners. It’s a must bookmark for all those who want to learn coding in .

Cheat Sheets: Dainis Graveris has listed 23 extremely useful cheat sheets for programmers and designers. This is one resource that you will love to the core.

Tutorials for Developing WordPress themes: Vandelay has posted a fantastic list of tutorials that help newbie’s in understanding theme designing.

Coda Clips: Coda is a text editor for web developers (mac only), it supports keeping small snippets for faster and quicker development. To support that, they started Coda Clips that features frequently used snippets and is regularly updated.

WordPress Mailing lists: official mailing list is the best place to keep yourself up to date with that is happening around and what are the new changes or requests made by the community. It’ll not only keep you up to date with the current status, it gives you the idea about what may be the next big feature of .

WordPress plugins to help WordPress Designers – We’ve featured 9 for that will surely help all the beginner’s in quicker development of .

Theme Frameworks

framework

A theme framework is the flexible foundation, that can be used to build faster and quicker, without worrying about coding various basic functionalities. Someone with prior experience in CSS would be able to quickly adapt to designing. We are listing some of the most popular theme frameworks over here.

Thematic – Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular , and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and development professionals.’’

Theme Hybrid – Hybrid is a user-friendly, search-engine optimized theme framework, featuring 15 custom page templates and 8 widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want. Like , this theme is completely free and open source. You can use it for your client work or for a about your grandchildren. It is continuously being developed and has a community growing around it.

WP Framework – WP Framework was created to serve as the starting point in theme development. It accomplishes this by providing you with commonly used functions and features that modern should have. So when you start a brand new project, using WP Framework you’ll already have the basic functionality set so you don’t have to worry about mundane task like creating the loop, or recreating all the standard template files.

Carrington – Carrington is a CMS theme framework for from Crowd Favorite, that makes it easy to create unique looks for different categories, posts and comments just by creating custom templates.

Books for newbie designers

There are various books written for and many are yet to be published. There are some fantastic books for , although I would like to mention these books for those who seriously want to be designers.

  • Rockable Press – How to be rockstar Designer is a fantastic e-book as it is focused on those who want to shift from regular web designing and want to become designers.
  • Vladimir Prelovac (not an affiliate link) – Vladimir has created lots and useful and some of the most popular for . He’s a great authority in plugin development. This book should be in arsenal of those who want to develop .

I hope these resources will be useful for anyone who wants to be a pro Designer. If you know any more resources, then please point them to us and we’d be more than happy to include them here.

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Improve the way you give feedback on websites

13 Jun, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

As a web studio, we give and receive feedback on the website/ every day. We make our lives simple by using Evernote’s premium accounts so that our clients get the ability to edit the notes that we share them for the feedback and we do the same while giving the feedback to our Ninjas! This certainly isn’t Evernote’s real function, however its been doing pretty well for us. However, it’s not as good as Notable, which is built to address this particular issue.

Zurb, a well-known company in the silicon valley that has worked with some of the top companies like Facebook, Ebay, Yahoo is behind Notable, an app that they built for internal use. Notable is a web-based application and great for designers and agencies who work from remote locations.

Notable - Easy collaboration for designers

The application works on Firefox, iPhone and of course, the browser-based functionality is available for all the platforms. You can clip any page on the browser and add notes on specific areas that you want to point out for the feedback. Once the feedback is uploaded on their servers, it can be discussed by team members using the comment form. All of this is part of the visual section, however since it’s focused towards the web agencies and freelancers, Zurb has taken care of the code and one of the best feature is that you can point out on the search engine optimization of the page as well!

Notable's Workspace

I was mostly impressed by Notable’s simplicity, its user interface is simple and without complex features that may confuse people. Its got the most important features packed for collaboration and notification, it allows you to restrict the collaborators to let them add notes or just view it.

Overall, I was fairly impressed with the application as it delivered all the features that we were looking in such an app. Notable certainly saves time as the feedback ends up being more contextual, visually accurate as it forces feedback givers to be specific. I would certainly suggest this app to all the freelancers who are into web designing as they’d find this app irresistible!

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Use beautiful fonts for typography on your blog!

9 Feb, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

typography.jpg

definitely plays an important role in enhancing or diminishing the overall look of any web . And all the web designers/developers were stuck with certain font families, even if they wanted to use the font of their choice, they couldn’t do it freely without compromising on various aspects. Of course, there were other ways too and I would love to include all those methods along with their pros & cons.

siFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is an open source JavaScript and Adobe Flash dynamic web fonts implementation, enabling the replacement of text elements on HTML web pages with Flash equivalents. sIFR embeds a font in a Flash element that displays the text, preempting the need for a font to have been manually pre-installed on a user’s system. [via : wikipedia]

In even simpler words, instead of showing the normal text – it is replaced by Adobe Flash’s text and the font embedded in that flash file is used to display the text. You can add shadow, effects to the text and the best part is that its cross-browser compatible and thats why its loved. However, siFR is often criticized for making the pages load slower and is not supported by iPhone.

Cufon

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to siFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use [This is not the case, if you are using WordPress]. Some of the benefits of Cufon over siFR are that it loads faster, no are required. [Via - Github]

Of course, nothing comes with cons. Cufon comes with the inability to highlight and copy/paste, not all fonts are supported. However, still its one of the preferred methods of using other fonts. We are using Cufon on this , so it can be a good example for you to look at.

There are other ways as well like Typeface.js, FLIR (Face Lift Image Replacement), however as browsers are getting better in supporting CSS3 – the better its becoming to improve the of the webpages. Although, with this method, copyright issues often come into play. In order to avoid these issues, few web services have come up with a model where by paying some fee, web designers will be able to choose various fonts (without worrying about licenses) for their website and the fonts will be served from their servers. Here are these services -

Typekit.jpg

Typekit

Typekit is one such service that has partnered with type foundries and have taken care of the legal issues. They let you choose the fonts using their web based editor. They have a plugin for WordPress, that lets you integrate this service with ease. There is an option of free plan and if you have one , you should definitely try this service.

fontmeup.jpg

FontMeUp

FontMeUp is another service that allows you to use any font on your website. They have a similar concept and have hundreds of fonts to choose from. They also have a free plan and a plugin.

So after, looking at the benefits of these services, I’m tempted to use these service for this . I’ll notify as soon as this will be applied and will try to post the results as well. Personally, I see no reason for not trying these services and why any one else shouldn’t. Will you be using these to improve the on your or will you be going via existing ways?

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Don’t Let WordPress Scare Your Clients

21 Dec, 2009 | Igor
Topics: web design


wordpress-for-clients.jpg

Image Credit – Twimg.com

is an excellent CMS and one of the most popular blogging platforms available. is free, open-source, extremely extendable and it gives the clients control over the content of their own website. It is quite user-friendly, it provides flexibility, you can use hundreds of and last but not least it has a huge support community. With all those positive attributes how can you not simply like it. However it can be a little bit different for your clients. While you are probably fully comfortable in managing, editing, and adding content, most of your clients probably will be regular people not technically savvy and may find hard to use. So part of our job would be to make things easier for these people for their better overall user experience with .

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How to Create Tabs in your WordPress theme using DOMtab

15 Dec, 2009 | Igor
Topics: Wordpress Customization, web design

Dom Tabs Save Space
If you run a for a longer time, you will notice that there is always more and more contents to display but less and less space for it. A solution for that can be the tabs feature. The Tabs are used in sidebars but also in the header for providing easy navigation and make information more available in a compact space. By using tabs you can have wide variety of content on your and all you need is to click on any tab and only the content for that tab gets displayed and the rest of the tabs’ content remains hidden.

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Chromotherapy in Blog Design!

23 Nov, 2009 | Igor
Topics: web design

Chromotherapy also known as Color therapy or colorology is a type of holistic healing that utilizes colors to achieve optimal health and it has been practiced by many races throughout the world for centuries. Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras applied color light therapeutically and ‘color halls’ were used for healing in ancient Egypt, China and India. Colors bring emotional reactions in people, when a color is seen, it can have an emotional impact and physical reaction. Different color provokes different reaction in humans: calming the nervous system, reduces blood pressure, energize, stimulate, increases Neuromuscular tone, stimulates happiness, brings on a sense of security, regeneration etc.

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WordPress Blog Design Services

10 Nov, 2009 | Oliver
Topics:

Why is a unique custom important?

It is always genuine quality content that really keeps the readers coming back to the , but a unique makes the to easily stand out amongst tons of others out there in the blogosphere and thus helps to make the first impression to a new visitor. And for a regular visitor, the ’s appearance creates an image in the mind of the reader which plays a big role in branding.

Why should you hire us?

Any good designer can claim that they with emphasis, contrast, balance, alignment, repetition, flow, etc, but a good also understands what the reader wants and what you want your readers to do. Target clientele as in what’s their age, how much time they spend online, etc along with what’s the goal of the as in branding your services, making money through ads, making money through affiliate links, etc all play an important role as to deciding how the and structure should be. We had web experience and also were bloggers (personal and then making money through ads) and then got into designing in Dec ’07 – and along the way have had the chance to work along with top pro bloggers like Yaro Starak, Daniel Scocco, Kevin Muldoon, Kyle Eslick and many more which has taught us a lot and now we put all this experience behind designing your .

What do you get?

Brainstorming on all the ideas you have in regards to features you have seen on other blogs, plus feedback from us in regards to what all features will best suit the needs of the .

A unique custom made that complements the goal of your , suits your unique content and provides ease of use to your readers.

Coding which is/has:

  • Table-less
  • Rollover and Dynamic Menu
  • Javascript Framework – jQuery (best option)
  • SEO Semantic, Complete Presentational Separation
  • Optimized for Load Speed
  • W3C Valid Shorthand and Optimized CSS
  • W3C Transitional XHTML 1.0
  • Cross Browser Compatible (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE7 & IE8)

Installation on the server (if you already have a , then creating a test location first and porting over all your content there and going through rigorous testing together before it goes live).

Clear Instructions including screenshots on how to easily manage your on .

3 months of free support on any issues in relation to the coding done by us and future paid support (discounted price for existing customers) for upgrade, addition/changes in features, etc.

How much does it cost?

The exact cost depends on the project requirements as in tabbed content in the sidebar, magazine style layout, featured content in javascript, embed videos/audio, etc – basically how much custom work we have to do on top of the default features available through admin and its . We work transparently with all our clients and charges are based on the efforts we put, as in number of hours and not what kind of we are designing or who you are or where you are from.

To start with!

Whether you have an existing or you want to start a new one, use the form below to let us know anything you have in mind for the i.e. your ideas, your budget (if you have one) or anything else you want. If you aren’t sure about what you want on the , then don’t worry as we know what questions to ask. So just get in touch and we will take it on from there.

Get in touch

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