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 you’re interested, you can see where this process started by checking out my first design idea post. And please, if you any of you have comments or suggestions, I’d love to read them.
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:
If you’re like me, you’ll probably want to go with option number two. Currently my theme testing plugin of choice is Theme Test Drive by Vladimir Prelovac. Theme Test Drive is easy to install and let’s you pick which theme administrators see. Everyone else views the site with the current default template. I have it running on a couple of the WordPress sites I run and it hasn’t caused me any trouble yet.
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.
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 a long time, but the power and cost of Google Analytics is hard to beat. It’s also easy to install. Just include a few lines of Javascript near the bottom of your site template.
Experience the power of a killer concept and deft choreography:
Over the next couple of days I’ll be coming up with design ideas for Media Grease. Whenever I have the time, I start the design process with sketches on actual paper (this goes for both print and web):
Once I’m comfortable with something I’ve put on paper, I’ll start “sketching” the design on the computer in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Here is an early design idea I’ve translated into Illustrator:
When working on the design of a CMS powered website—like this one—you generally have four options:
I usually go with #2 or #4, and this time, as you may have guessed from the post title, I’m going with #4. After some quick research, I’ve chosen to go with The Sandbox as my blank theme. Mostly because of how impressed I was with the documentation.
Here’s what it looks like now that it’s installed:
Pretty boring, but it will be easier to build on than the default WordPress theme.
I just setup a FeedBurner feed for Media Grease which you can access at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/mediagrease
Using FeedBurner helps in a couple ways. When people and bots check your feed, they are hitting FeedBurner’s servers and not yours. FeedBurner has a number of feed customization options that aren’t built into WordPress, like the ability to have one feed address for RSS, RSS2 and Atom.
There is a little more work involved in getting your WordPres site to direct people to the FeedBurner feeds instead of the built in ones. For that purpose I’m using a WordPress plugin called Feed Locations.
I’ve just upgraded Media Grease to WordPress 2.5.1 from 2.5. I’m a little surprised they haven’t made upgrading easier. If you need to upgrade your blog, the upgrade instructions are here.
I’m web and print designer Chris Johnson and welcome to my brand new professional design blog. This site will be dedicated to the things I know and learn about designing for web and print.
Media Grease is built on the WordPress content management system and is hosted by WebFaction. Both are products that I would have no qualms in recommending for anyone looking for blog software and web hosting
One of things I hope to do with this site is use it as a public journal for my design projects. To kick that off, I’m going to write about my experience massaging the WordPress platform to create my vision of Media Grease.
At the time of writing this post, Media Grease is operating on WordPress 2.5 with no extra plug-ins and the default template:
My web development browser of choice is Firefox mainly thanks to the beyond excellent Firebug plugin. After a quick Google search I also came across a plugin called Screengrab! that I’m going to use for taking project screenshots like the one you see above.
Stay tuned and thanks for visiting!
