Here are the videos for the Web Designers for Print Designers videos. Here are the word posts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Brilliant cartoon about mental models
I love this! He’s managed to encapsulate an important (and oft-ignored) truth about design, in such a way that it will be accessible to everyone: http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/23/mental-model-diagrams-cartoon/ Here is another one he did about personas (again—important idea, hard to explain and sell to your team): http://thinkvitamin.com/design/how-to-understand-your-users-with-personas/ I’m thinking this is really a key—cartoons. Encapsulate everything easily Make it [...]
Promising Plugins: Duplicator
Duplicate, clone, backup and transfer an entire site from one location to another in 3 easy steps. The Duplicator plugin is designed to give WordPress Administrators the ability to migrate a site from one location to another location in 3 easy steps. Just create a package, download it and install. No need to change all [...]
Delete Unwanted WordPress Custom Capabilities
What happens, as mentioned in this post in the WordPress forum, is that you can end up with custom capabilities as remnants of old plugins you’ve used–or, as in my case, because I am playing around with custom capabilities. It’s very easy in various role plugins to say “Add New Capability”, but nowhere could I [...]
Uploaded the Web Newbie’s Survival Guide
I wrote this some years ago, and kind of forgot about it–but even though it was on an old site, people would periodically download it and read it! I wrote it in hopes of preparing people for hiring a web designer/developer, or for the overall process of creating a website, in hopes that it would [...]
Reasons Not to Hack Pre-Built Themes, #1: Gorgon’s Knot of Conditional Code
I’ve been collating the reasons why it’s unwise to do any significant customization to custom-built themes. Here’s one: Premium theme builders are selling to a market that wants tons and tons of options. Under the hood, that translates into zillions of conditional segments. I’ve borrowed, and partially obfuscated, a chunk of code I’m having to [...]
WordPress Best Practices Database Published
I just published a WordPress best practices database, here: wp-best-practices.asdf573189.com/. It’s mainly for my internal use and sharing with colleagues, but I might as well share it with the world, as well.
Roots Theme—HTML5+Responsive Design+more
Responsive Design CSS So I have been looking a lot at Responsive Design. If you are not familiar, my brutish summary is: Fluid layouts are (a) manageable, (b) cool. You can use the CSS @media queries feature to rearrange elements on your page layout, based on different window widths, and this means making things easier [...]
Web Design Process: Design in the Browser?
“Designing in the Browser” My previous post about web design for print designers, got me thinking more about what the “best” process, the best workflow, for designing and creating websites is. Andy Clarke, a very influential British web designer gave a very influential talk about this a few years ago, being a proponent of “designing [...]
