Web Design – One Week Deadline

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: September 1st, 2010 | 0 Comments

Today I have begun work on a new website design. The site is for a local business and it is a huge upgrade of their current site. I have already made some minor changes to their current design, but not a lot could be done with their current site, I did not design the current site! In case you haven't guessed what the site is, it is a site for wedding cars and limos, as well as a taxi company. Above is a picture of how the site currently sits, as you can see a lot of work needs to be done to it to make it more inviting and to add some life to it. Currently the site is too dark and dull and does not contain enough information for the visitors or potential clients. My client is in a bit of a rush to have this site upgraded, so a deadline of approximately a week has been set. This is a tight deadline, considering the amount of work that needs to be done, I am used to having more time to complete a site. So what all I am going to be doing to this site? First off it is going to be sitting on an entirely new domain name, at the moment the domain name is a bit of a mouthful at 19 characters in length! The current domain is annavillalimousines.com , it is just too long to expect someone to remember when going to look up your business and it's not exactly snappy enough either. The new domain name however is much simpler to remember and I will keep it quiet until I have the site launched. The next change is the biggest, it is the entire site! From concept to design to code and implementation, it has all been left to me to create something new, brighter and more inviting to potential customers. I will be designing the new site in Photoshop, and work has already begun on that, last night I made up a quick draft of the site and today I made lots of changes to it in relation to colours. Tomorrow I will be showing my design idea to the client to see if he likes it or if there is something different that he wants done with it. Before I used to hate having to build websites from scratch, I am great when it comes to the coding side of things, but design is not my strong point at all. Now however I have learnt how to use Photoshop to get the results I like so I am a lot more comfortable with designing sites from scratch and I now find it much more interesting and fun! Once the design gets the go ahead it will be on to making the rest of the content for the remaining pages of the site and then I will begin the stage of coding! I want to build this design using the WordPress platform, it is my native platform that I use for websites and I know it inside out by now. I used to never know how to build a theme for WordPress, but over this last summer I looked into building WordPress themes and I realised they are really simple once you get though one. Also by using WordPress it gives me the ability to enhance the websites presence online by adding some strong SEO to the site, thanks to the many plugins available from the WordPress community. The final step to this site will be to create a Facebook group and promote it, it's always great to have a client that wants there site to be a bit more modern and integrate it with social networks!

Really not happy with my blog currently

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: September 15th, 2009 | 0 Comments

There are a lot of different things on this blog that i do  like however there is also a lot i do not like. I think it is mainly leaning in the direction of things that i do not like.

A few months ago i revamped this blog completely; it was to show that i have more interest in this blog and by changing everything and having a nice new logo it was a mark on when i started to take a keen interest in blogging on a more regular basis.

Now i feel that there are a lot of changes that need to happen and that i have started to look into. First off i really want to add a little more light to the design, so i am on the lookout for a really nice theme, wordpress of course, that with a little modifying would suit this site.

Looking around for themes is really difficult as the majority of them are far too cluttered, what i am looking for is a nice bright and simple theme, and i want one that is really quick at loading. I know plugins take time to load and that is what really slows down a site but also so can a theme.

That is onto my second point, any slow plugins will have to go and will be getting replaced with lighter ones. The twitter updates that i currently have in my sidebar really slows down the page load, so i am going to do away with that in my next theme when i get it sorted out.

A great image editing plugin for WordPress

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: August 30th, 2009 | 0 Comments

A great feature of the Wordpress platform is that it allows you to easily implement pictures into your posts & pages with little to no effort.

However there has always been one thing missing from this, that is the ability to crop, and rotate your images live whilst you upload them. On numerous occasions i have uploaded a picture and then realized that i had put it the wrong way round. I would then have to re-upload a rotated version; this all takes time, time that i could use doing something else.

Tonight i was looking about the Wordpress plugin's page and found a great small plugin that lets you crop, resize, rotate and add watermarks to your pictures. You do not have to upload a picture then go to a different page in your admin panel to edit the picture, the plugin is implemented into the existing Wordpress image upload box and it only takes 2 seconds to fix up a picture.

I know for sure i will be using this plugin a lot in the future. The plugin is called: Scissors and can be found on the Wordpress plugin directory.