Posts Tagged ‘Websites’

Yes­terday, I received two emails from dif­ferent clients, both inquiring about building WordPress-based web­sites. I responded, as I usu­ally do: “Word­Press is awe­some! I love building sites with Word­Press! Let’s do it!” I’ve found that I’m using it as the back­bone for a lot of my web­sites these days (including the entirety of this one!), and I love it more and more the more time I spend with it.

Why?

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When I was working on my new design for this web­site, I spent a lot of time eval­u­ating my options for image dis­play, as it’s one of the most vital ele­ments of the site. I had very spe­cific require­ments for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the gal­leries, and the ease of imple­men­ta­tion. I spent for­ever looking through all sorts of Word­Press plu­gins, hacks, and stand­alone solu­tions, and even­tu­ally set­tled (grudg­ingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the Sim­ple­Viewer plugin.

Of course, after spending for­ever (I stopped counting some­where along the line) spent making it work pre­cisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my port­folio is now dis­playing with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth hap­pened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My con­tact form plugin had also deac­ti­vated itself without my noticing some­where along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the Sim­ple­Viewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and imple­menting the change, so things are going to look ter­rible between now and then.) I found an alter­na­tive that I think will be better, and sim­pler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every port­folio post and upload new gal­leries: Gal­lifrey, based on Gal­ler­iffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll rec­og­nize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Word­Press’ built-in gallery func­tions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to imple­ment my triple-bordered image dis­play that I wanted ini­tially for this site. Sim­ple­viewer, you were fan­tastic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

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After all the hectic-ness and flurry of activity that was the big web­site launch, I took a whole day off for the first time in ages. I curled up with a blanket and read a good hun­dred or so pages of The Master and Mar­garita (which I highly rec­om­mend), then went out to a Christmas party dressed as, depending on how you see it, either a very large, very talk­a­tive present, or a Vegas wait­ress on Christmas.

I felt so refreshed the next day that I very nearly made it a whole weekend off work! After all, what are Sun­days for if not cat­naps and hot baths, and gen­eral relax­ation? How­ever, my photographically-inclined room­mate was applying for a job, and her tumblr web­site was doing a ter­rible job of show­casing her skills.

So we sat down together, spent about half an hour combing through pho­tographs of trees, and even­tu­ally pulled together this quick-and-dirty little web­site for her. It’s using the same image-display script I use for my own site, and there are still a few kinks I’ll need to work out, but it’s a good example of what can be pulled together in an evening if you’re moti­vated enough.

Do check out her web­site—she does some lovely work, and she’s looking to do more!

About 95% of the work I do tends fall into the “logos and web­sites” cat­e­gory, but every now and again I’m given the oppor­tu­nity to work on some­thing a little dif­ferent. One of my favourite “little dif­ferent some­thing” is the resume. I’ve designed a number of them, and I always enjoy them. They’re chal­lenging from an infor­ma­tion hier­archy point of view, and people really notice them. I’ve heard all kinds of com­ments, in part I think because people are so used to seeing the same boring MS Word tem­plates.

Julie Smith is a Toronto lawyer whose resume I recently designed. She sent her resume out to two dif­ferent com­pa­nies one day, and was given an inter­view on the second. Later, she passed along this com­ment from a headhunter:

Your resume looks fan­tastic! One of the best I’ve ever seen!

So, if you find your­self facing unem­ploy­ment (I’m not going to use the “R” word, or even the “D” word, but do feel free to rumi­nate on the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate in what­ever manner you’d prefer), you should invest in a custom-designed resume! It’s cheap, it’s fun, and it may even get you a job. And I get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone out.

I’ve had the cra­ziest last-little-while: per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally, oth­er­wise. I took my first vaca­tion in years and dis­ap­peared into the Mayan jungle for a week, and I’ve just recently returned from just shy of a full month spent on-the-road, living out of suit­cases and back­packs and the trunk of my car. It’s been utterly fabulous–exhausting and refreshing simul­ta­ne­ously, and just what I needed to return to my life & busi­ness with a clean brain & slate.

I have many sto­ries and pho­tographs, which are forth­coming. For now, two new projects: the hol­iday cards I mean to do every year, and a redesign and rearchi­tec­turing of Fer­n­wood Pub­lishing.

The Good: Digsby is gor­geous. I love the gigantic flu­o­res­cent “down­load” bar that gets OS-specific after you click on it. I love their coming soon page, too, although I might have pre­ferred to find an actual download.

The Bad: No more Digby. I’m trying hard not to think about it because it makes me sad. Why aren’t there more beau­tiful & clever, highly sat­u­rated things around? (I am hap­piest in tech­ni­colour). I don’t under­stand why “reality” is so inter­esting. There’s enough reality right out­side my door; I’d rather the fan­tasy when I’m looking to get out of my head.

and the Ridicu­lous: Minggl thinks “b3k 4w5″ isn’t a valid postal code. It took me three tries to figure out they wanted me to cap­i­talize it. Seri­ously? Canada Post will deliver my mail if I forget the majority of the address and scrawl it upside down with a six-inch-wide marker, but some web app that isn’t ever going to send me mail can’t val­i­date a low­er­case postal code?

Also, why are all web apps named by dyslexic five year olds now? I miss real words.

but appar­ently I’m not. I’ve actu­ally had “update web­site” on my to-do list for the last three or four weeks. In the past week it’s actu­ally been upgraded to “update web­site PLEASE” and “for the love of EVERYTHING, UPDATE WEBSITE ALREADY”. I’m starting to sus­pect it might be easier to switch over from my custom-built Ruby on Rails pow­ered site to a cus­tomized Word­Press site, which could easily handle every­thing my RoR is doing with a much easier-to-use backend (not that man­u­ally editing data­base fields isn’t easy).

I’ve been using Word­Press for every­thing lately, and have totally fallen in love with it. I seem to always be a little behind the curve on web trends (as a side note, I’m now on Twitter, though I still don’t really under­stand the point entirely) due to my gen­eral dis­taste for trends (if everyone likes it, it can’t pos­sibly be any good, right?). But I really wish I’d dis­cov­ered the power and flex­i­bility of Word­Press ear­lier on—it’s bril­liant and I’m begin­ning to use it for more and more of my client projects.

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I’ve been doing some work with email newslet­ters of late. It is, of course, a bit of a chal­lenge, given how email is even less reli­able at prop­erly inter­preting standards-compliant CSS code and the like. (Seri­ously, one of these days, all these com­pa­nies will get together and start imple­menting code con­sis­tently, across the board, and web designers across the world will sud­denly find that what used to take ten hours now only takes one. Com­pa­nies like the fab­u­lous BrowserCam will go out of busi­ness. Why is so much of our economy built on busy-work? Screw the unem­ploy­ment rate, I want effi­ciency!)

Anyway. Two things I’ve learned:

• Gmail doesn’t care about your CSS text-formatting. That’s right, that means you’ll need to use <FONT> tags. Gross. I haven’t used those in at least five years!
• Out­look 2007 will make things look ugliest. Appar­ently, this is because it uses the MS Word ren­dering engine. Now, seri­ously? Why? If you’ve ever tried to design any­thing in Word, well, you know how impos­sible it is. They do, how­ever, pro­vide this handy little “val­idator” to check to see how/if your code is going to work, which is nice for those of us who get the shakes just opening Out­look. And it’ll plug into Dreamweaver!

On a vaguely related, but mostly unre­lated, note: remember to vote, kids! This is the first year in a while I haven’t been directly involved in doing design work for a cam­paign, and as a result I’m less jazzed about the elec­tion than I usu­ally am, but it’s starting to get to me as the day goes on. Go! Vote! (Or at least spoil your ballot (though it’s illegal to do so). Or vote Lib­er­tarian, if you can! Effi­ciency 2008! Down with Busy-Work! Alright, now I’m excited.)

I usu­ally use Scrip­ta­l­i­cious for my AJAX needs, but I’m working on a set of AJAX-ified forms on a web­site that’s already using jQuery, so I figure hey, it can’t be that hard to change over! Twenty min­utes later, cue the loud cursing and growling. I mean, the whole thing seems far more pow­erful, but every time I’ve wanted to start imple­menting it, I’ve been turned off by how com­plex it seems to do simple things. (Like slide down a div window, which I hope to have accom­plished before I turn 30. On a side note, I’ve been feeling old because I turned 25 today, until my little sister sent me a mes­sage saying that I’m “plenty young, for a pres­i­dent!” Which I sup­pose is tech­ni­cally true, so I don’t feel quite so washed up anymore.)

Anyway, back to my jQuery-induced headache: this very helpful thing to the rescue! If I can stop being dis­tracted by the gor­geous site design, I might be able to figure this stuff out, after all, without having to spend all day teaching my brain new methods of pro­gram­ming. I do so love pro­gram­ming tuto­rials written for designers. Thank you, pretty colourful website!

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m deter­mined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two min­utes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two min­utes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rear­ranging. (more…)