Monthly Archives: May 2008

A better meta menu widget

May 28, 2008 – 12:00 am

Recently I’ve been customizing the Media Grease sidebar. I’ve added a tag cloud widget, a recent comments widget and a manually updated “greatest hits” list. Ultimately, my plan is to move the recent comments, recent posts and greatest hits list to the top of the site using Javascript and CSS.
But I digress.
One of the things [...]

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Media Grease, Projects, Tools/Services, Web design | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Using Sifr for nice fonts

May 24, 2008 – 1:14 am

There are just sometimes when you want to use a nice font on your website. Unfortunately, there is no easy way embed custom fonts using HTML/CSS. That generally means you’re stuck using ‘core’ fonts like Arial, Times, Verdana, Georgia, etc.
You could use images, or Flash movies, but both are labor intensive and break accessibility. With [...]

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Media Grease, Projects, Tools/Services, Web design | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Media Grease: Moving from images to reality

May 13, 2008 – 10:03 pm

Since I finished the design comps last Thursday, I’ve been working on moving from my Adobe Illustrator files to the actual WordPress theme based on Sandbox.
With the help of Adobe Photoshop, some hand coded HTML and CSS, and the jQuery javascript framework, I’ve programmed approximately 20% of the theme. That includes the basic layout, the [...]

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Media Grease design ideas, Part 3

May 10, 2008 – 11:53 pm

I’ve had the chance to refine the design direction I wrote about last weekend:

The most important thing was deciding the design and typographic direction for the posts themselves. I wanted to match the overall tone of the rest of the look while being as legible as possible.
I don’t know if I’ll actually use the sidebar [...]

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Comments (0)

Media Grease design ideas, Part 2

May 4, 2008 – 10:22 pm

I’ve been working hard today on coming up with the design direction for Media Grease. Here is a sample of where I’m at in Adobe Illustrator:

Over the next few days I’ll be explaining where I got some of the bits and pieces for this design, like the orange feed icon and seamless background wood texture.
If [...]

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

How to test your new WordPress themes

May 4, 2008 – 3:34 pm

Before you change or update the theme of your WordPress site, it’s a good practice to test that theme first. That way your site’s visitors aren’t greeted with a broken site.
Unfortunately, WordPress offers no built in testing solution, so you generally have two options:

Try out your theme on a test version of WordPress running either [...]

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Tools/Services, Web design | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Random Excellence: Beck 8-Bit package

May 1, 2008 – 10:27 am

Check out this experimental packaging for Beck 8-Bit by Design Has No Name:

The plastic Nintendo’esque cartridge then opens up to reveal the CD. You can find more pictures at TheDieline.com.

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Package design, Print design, Random Excellence | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Added Google Analytics for stat tracking

May 1, 2008 – 8:11 am

Today I setup Media Grease to use the free Google Analytics service. Google’s system gives webmasters detailed statistics about how their website is used. You’ll know how people got to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they visited, where they live (roughly), and so on.
Stat tracking of this sort has been around for [...]

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Projects, Tools/Services, Web design | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)