Posted by squareleaf on Nov 17, 2011 in
web design I recently completed a new site, built in WordPress. The site is for APA Editor, Ardell Broadbent. She previously had a site built in GoDaddy’s Website Tonight product that was no longer serving her needs. Despite the fact that Website Tonight does not have an easy export function, I saved all the content for the site, converted and updated it, and optimizing it by stripping out extraneous html and spacing along the way. We redid the color scheme to match some color research she had done and added some downloads. The client was very happy with the site, and we will soon be working on another site for her vacation rental property.
Tags: websites, WordPress
Posted by squareleaf on Oct 12, 2011 in
design,
learning,
web design,
working habits I’ve been taking a PHP refresher class through a friend who edits a PHP magazine, trying to keep my skills current in an often-changing field. I found a couple other good online, “casual” courses that I’d recommend as well. Codecademy does a brief intro course in JavaScript that could be a good refresher or introduction. And Method of Action is putting together a series of courses for teaching programmers how to design. I took their kerning quiz and got 85 out of 100. What can I say – I’m a sucker for quizzes! Both of these online courses are free, as far as I can tell, and they’re actually kind of fun. They’re certainly not going to make you into an expert, but they’re a good way to brush up or delve into something you don’t know.
Tags: Codecademy, design, learning, Method of Action, online courses, PHP, programming
Posted by squareleaf on Apr 27, 2011 in
design,
web design Designing your own website, even when you design lots of sites for others, is really hard. I think it’s even harder to design your own as a designer because you always know all the possibilities. You’ve seen it all and then some. You look at another designer’s portfolio and see elements in their designs that are so interesting you have to incorporate them. You want to do everything, even though that’s not practical at all. So, even though I should have redesigned this website a year or more ago, I never did. I had analysis paralysis. I was never going to get it exactly right, so I never started. Then, finally, I realized that I had to start. Even if I changed it every other week, I had to start somewhere.
So, yeah, that blotch of red up there probably could be interpreted as a blood splotch. I suppose, if I were inclined to give artistic philosophies to my work, I would say that I chose to demonstrate that doing good design can hurt. Or I could say it was a comment on having to be on the “bleeding edge” of technology, a phenomenon that I find obnoxious and bothersome. But, really, the real reason it’s there is because I wanted to add a touch of red, saw that, and really liked it. Sometimes good design is that simple: you like it.
Tags: design, websites