Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
New Theme, Accumulo, and New Free Plugin
In my plans for 2010 I said I wanted to release 3 premium themes, and earlier this week Darren Hoyt and I released the first of the bunch.
Accumulo – WordPress themeAccumulo is an RSS aggregation theme designed to imitate sites such as Popurls.com and Alltop.com, and in particular Darrens own WPTopics.
The unique selling point of Accumulo is the tabbed homepage on which you can place any ...
Building WPVote Part 6 : Planning for Lift Off
Now that the WPVote site is almost complete I need to prepare it for release.
Since I have developed online all I really need to do is redirect the DNS from the current site to my own servers. However there are a couple of things I should take care of.
The sites old content needs to be copied over to my installed version Set up a new development area ...Building WPVote Part 5 : Programming
I’m nearly finished with the design of my new WordPress voting site, WPVote, so now need to look more closely at the programming.
I enjoy dissecting WordPress themes, and since I also like code simplicity and minimalism (and am working with a child theme) I decided to strip out as much of the original WPVote theme as possible.
First I had to go through the theme files and work out which were ...
Building WPVote : Part 4b, The Logo Revisited
Last time I wrote about WPVote I got a lot of feedback on the design of the logo. I was actually quite happy with how it was looking but the comments got me thinking and I soon realised it wasn’t as hot as I first thought…
So I spent some time coming up with new variations and thought it would be interesting to get some feedback on them as well.
I designed the variations based on the feedback I had received. ...
Building WPVote Part 4 : Design
Once I had finished researching similar voting sites I was ready to start designing and building the WPVote theme.
To decide basic page structure I went with Balsamiq mockups and knocked out some quick reference designs. I had a firm idea in mind for how the theme would function so it wasn’t that hard to make the images, and Balsamiq is REALLY easy to use so I had my reference images built quickly.
As I mentioned in part 3 ...
Building WPVote Part 3 : Research
After receiving the WPVote domain and theme from Jean I moved on to stage 3. Researching ‘competitors‘ websites.
I must admit I tend not to do too much research when building a website, but this time I did decide to do some look into similar sites for inspiration.
WPVote is essentially a Digg clone, so I knew what to make, but at the same time I wanted to make it something ...
Building WPVote Part 2 : Planning
In part 1 of Building WPVote I mentioned how I have recently purchased WPVote from Jean-Baptiste Jeung.
The first thing I did before I even spoke to Jean was trying to think of simple things I could do that would add greatest value with least effort. This was a project I wanted to monetize from the start, and I didn’t want to spend months and months developing it.
I intend for the ...
WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide review
WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide surprised me positively. To be honest, I did hesitate before accepting a review copy from the publishers as I fully expected it to be “just” a beginner’s guide to WordPress mu (the multi user version of WordPress) – essentially the same as a beginner’s guide to WordPress, only with a couple extra characters in the name.
I was wrong.
Yes, it covers WordPress mu, but ...
