Soon my new blog theme will be going live. Lately I have been doing a lot of web design and I have become very familiar with how best to structure a website theme that you may later want to use as a wordpress theme.

When you see my new theme it will be a shock in comparison to this current dark one, however I think it is the best way to move forward with my blog. The trend nowadays is more whitespace, less clutter, which at the moment this theme is more like the latter.

If you follow my twitter feed, you may have seen a while back that I posted a link to an image of the new blog design, if you didn’t see it then you could always go and look through my recent tweets. Below here I will add in a small preview of the new layout, it doesn’t show much, but you can get a glimpse of the new colour scheme.

With this next upgrade I will be finally introducing a new page to my blog, and I think it will be one of my most important pages. The page I will be adding is my portfolio section, I think it is about time I showcase some of the work I have done and maybe attract potentially some new clients!

So where am I at in terms of progress with the new theme? So far I have the design completed and I have fully coded the site I HTML and CSS, next step is porting to wordpress.

Last Thursday (October 30th) a website which I have been working on, for what would seem like a long time was finally launched live! I had actually completed the entire site except for one page, ‘Our Team’, by the beginning of the summer, but I couldn’t put it live because I was waiting for photographs of the staff. Finally last Monday I got all the photographs and I was able to complete the site and put it live.

So the site I was working on was for a local hair salon, eclips hair, and I created the entire site from scratch. This website was my first ever wordpress platform based design for a client. I designed the site in Photoshop, then I coded and styled it using Dreamweaver in basic html and css. Once I had the template coded I then began to port it over to wordpress, this was actually not too difficult, it was a lot simpler than I thought it would have been.

There was a few things that broke when I brought it over to the wordpress platform, such as a few styles, but I managed to get it sorted, thanks to a Firefox plugin called firebug.

The website has a lot in it, it has Php, JavaScript and jQuery (fancy JavaScript). It gave me a chance to experiment with things I wouldn’t of used before. I also took full advantage of Google street view, the day I launched the site happened to be the day that street view was launched here in Ireland so I just decided to throw it in and be ahead of the game!

I also set up custom email addresses (hosted by Google for domains) for the website, by custom I mean it would be in the format of anything@yourdomain.com, so for eclips hair I could make one that looked much more professional than there old yahoo account address!

So from design to coding I done it all, now all that remains is SEO, that takes time, and another reason I chose the wordpress platform was because it has such good SEO power. Already the site is at the top of Google, one site is above it, however it is linking to the eclips hair website so that’s ok, for now!

I reckon with a bit more time, it will be above all the other competition. I still have to get the keywords for the likes of ‘hair salon’ and ‘hair stylist’ into the site to try and get it into those search results.

The site also has a CMS (content management system) which makes it really easy to just log in and make a quick change if need be such as changing pictures or adding in special offers.

I definitely recommend using wordpress for building a site because you also have the huge plugin directory available to you from wordpress.com.

So reflecting on this website, I am really happy with how it came out. I think next time I update the site, I will be able to do so much more as this has been a learning curve for me since it was wordpress based.

So if you want to have a look at the site, then the address is www.eclipshair.ie.

Today we had a guest speaker in one of our classes as part of a seminar series where a few guest speakers will come in and talk to us about their job and allow us to ask them any questions, from how they do certain things or how you can get to where they are, anything!

Today’s guest speaker was Dr. Vivienne Mee, she currently works for Deloitte where she specializes in computer forensics. Vivienne used to attend DKiT so there is some hope for us that we too can get a great job, providing we really work for it once we finish up this degree!

Vivienne told us all about her educational background from DKiT where she graduated with a BSc in Software Development and where she studied Computer Forensics in Glamorgan University in Wales.  I won’t go into everything she told us about, but I found it extremely interesting.

When I came home from college after the seminar I had a look at the course on computer forensics and I was amazed to see that it’s not actually too difficult to get into!

If you are an international student, which if you are from Ireland, you are, then they assess your results from college and school and make their decision if they will accept you or not. The course is 3 years in total, it’s expensive, and I would say it is an intense 3 years, however a great job would be waiting for you when you are finished.

It gives me something to maybe think about, maybe I will go into that area, maybe not or maybe something along those lines, it is great to see different options that are available after I finish my current degree.

So from this seminar we are expected to write up a report and then submit it, should be fairly straight forward, plenty of notes were taken!