Tag: Web Design

Big things to come…

Syllie

WordPress Developer

Sometimes all things seem to happen at once. I have been working hard this week – creating a new WordPress template for one of our clients and slowly I feel more like a WP developer.

I had a discussion on such matter before – some years ago. This was with a former collegue and we talked about skills, skill levels and just knowing a bit more than anyone else, and particularly clients, and that is how we make a living but in the back of our heads we are scared that one day it may all come out and we will be tagged as fakes. Don’t get me wrong – I know quite a bit of everything, but I do not feel a specialist in any particular field – I like almost all work I do (which is fortunate as there are many people that hate whatever they do for a living). I have done quite some coding over the years – in several programming languages, I have done database development, I do graphics design and if you have ever visited Very Simple Designs you know I write tutorials for graphic design too. I have built and maintained quite a few websites, and I can read and breathe HTML and CSS. I worked with several CMSs, but that was more a matter of technical implementation and tweaking of existing templates. So when I got hired as web developer for a company that uses WP – I knew I had to build more skills. My motto is “yes I can” but I had to work hard to extend my skill set. Both the WP Codex as well as Google were my friends – and as I said in the first sentence – I slowly feel more like a WP developer.

It is interesting tho – I used WP for years as blogging software. This site uses it. I did not have a lot of requirements at the time and figured I could get away with the standard configuration. And I did not even bother to create or install a fancy theme – it is a very simple one – one that had a colour scheme that I liked already and I just uploaded a new header. How lazy can one be? But the company I work for actually (tries) to use WordPress as CMS. What can I say? It is NOT a CMS – it is blogging software – no matter what people claim. Its architecture is not suitable for complex site managment. For Very Simple Designs we used Joomla! which is a full fledged CMS with many more options – better configurable and certainly more suited for customizations, extensions and reusability than WP in its current state. But I am learning to overcome WP’s limitations and to cope with the restrictions that the business put upon development (as for an unsatisfactory explained reason the use of widgets is not allowed). So indeed – I am a WP developer now and there is a lot more to learn yet.

So what’s the big news?

This week both Inkscape (my all time favorite vector editing software) as well as Joomla! (a favorite CMS of mine) both released statements about upcoming releases.

Inkscape

The Inkscape team completed the goal for the bug hunt and is now making the final decision on items that will be included in the upcoming 0.48 release. They also announced the winning design for the new Inkscape 0.48 splash screen. The alpha release for Inkscape 0.48 will follow soon, in the mean time check out the Inkscape download page for nightly builds and feel free to experiment with the development releases and participate in the testing to make this a kick-ass release.

Joomla!

The Joomla team finally released Joomla! 1.6 Beta. I am very excited about this as it will bring plenty new features, amongst which a new access control system, unlimited depth organisation model (no more struggles to put subcategories under categories – the category tree can be fully user defined), a simplified process for updating extensions, and also better XHTML semantics in layouts. I will be using the beta release and migrate the VSD website to it on a virtual machine – just to see how much these new features will mess with the current content. But there is no doubt in my mind that we will migrate to Joomla 1.6 soon after production release is available.

Other things that keep me busy

  • I am customizing some WP plugins to make them more flexible (re-usable) in our projects. Some of that work may be released here in near future.
  • We managed to get tickets for the Metallica concert in November – long way ahead but we are looking forward to it.
  • The kitties are growing fast – naughty as ever. We are still a bit worried as Moogie is very particular about her food and still very skinny tho the vet says she’s developing alright. Dax is wild and eats like a beast – food disappears in seconds and then she tries to steal Moogie’s food. Sometimes she eats too much too fast and that makes her sick. She meows and announces that she does not feel well but before I finish clean up she is running around like nothing happened. The worms are gone – and nothing serious to worry about now.

Talking about redesign

Syllie

When we started with verysimpledesigns.com last December, we did things low profile as we were frantically going through our designs to decide what could be used for download, what could be turned into a tutorial and we were not really sure what direction to take yet.

Thing is that we design stuff from logos to stationery and fabrics, but also create illustrations and digital art and as we are both techies, we do website design (front-end and back-end) as well.

I am quite familiar with CMS systems, but when we decided to use Joomla for verysimpledesigns.com, I had to learn a lot of new things. And as we just wanted to get the site going, we decided to use a freeware template, install some plugins and that was that. No big publishing campaign, so not a lot of visitors, which gave us a lot of time to sort things out and add some content to the site. We had some plans for reworking the design, but sofar it has just been plans. Today we started to talk about actually changing things.

We like the current layout. It is distiguishly different than most other websites – that conveniently use 2.0 to indicate their style, but we all know that again is just a buzz word. I like many of those layouts, but somehow one looks like the next and the next again. We do however need to redesign the website, to allow for more modules, get the breadcrumbs working properly, depend less on plugins, and optimize the site further for SEO. The site is quite easily found by most search engines, especially now all our image are slowly being indexed, but we sure could use a few more proper links. We are considering a link exchange page too (realizing that we are not that interesting yet, but at least we can support the sites that we consider to be cool).

So template design for Joomla, we keep the purple but I do not know where it will take us next. We also will finally implement forums so we can create better interaction with our users.

Lots of plans that will keep us busy for a while again.

Last day of 2009!

Syllie

Living in Oz means that you’re ahead of the world. Not technologically or socially or so.. but in time. There are only a few places earlier, as we all know from the millenium celebrations.

So how to spend the last day of 2009? I promised I would bring some “continental style” desserts to tonight’s party – so some work ahead there. I checked the website and thought it would be nice to have a “hello 2010” post with a nice design. So hopefully I’ll find the time to complete that.

And starting tomorrow I will work on a new Joomla template. The one we use now is based on ‘Colorfall’ by [ Anch ] Gorsk.net Studio. It is a bit too limited for our purposes, even tho I really like the layout. Nowadays all high profile websites seem to use the same clean cut design style – 13 in a dozen, and if a CMS is running the show, container styles are typically in use. That is why I like this template: it is different. And I applied a bold colour purple to it, changed the graphics and it certainly looks different.

Down-side: it has a hidden tag on each page to link back to the authors website. From SEO point of view: not smart. So today I sorta reluctantly removed it – and tomorrow proper credit will be given but on a weblinks page. Other things that sorta bug me: only 2 user modules, no header, breadcrumbs and so on. No place to implement a store element as the user modules are only available in the outer right columns. And the CSS is quite limited – not all elements are styled which can result in some horrifying layouts – for example- when I switched on pagination for a long article.

It does not really matter – I should have done a proper template from scratch – but I was a bit too focussed on getting the website online and to have an outlet for some of our work. So even tho I do not make New Year’s resolutions, I am quite resolute in doing a re-design of the template. Just to keep me busy *winks*

Joomla and search engine friendliness

Syllie 2 Comments

Xmas day, and it is kinda hot out here. It is close to 30 degC today, and for a girl that comes from the northern hemisphere, it feels quite unrealistic to have Xmas dinner in these temperatures. So we turned the airconditioner on, and we spent some time doing geeky things. The family thinks we’re weird anyways.

So what did we do? We tried to make VerySimpleDesigns.com more search engine friendly. I did install some analytic tools earlier already, and I see that some people do find the site even without me actively promoting it. It is a project which we prefer to do without placing screaming ads on the site, and we try not to upload crap, altho we do need some feedback from those that actually download the stuff to know what they think of it. Existing content needs to be tweaked further obviously, but we also realised that we better worked on SEO/SEF before we have too much content to validate.

We host the site on a linux platform, so used .htaccess to do some URL rewriting, and we configured Joomla to make use of this setting. Also the default SEF settings were enabled, we installed the SEF Patch from JoomlaAtWork as well as the sh404SEF component. The latter is a bit of a funny story – it is a free component, issued under GNU/GPL licence – but to download the latest version you are expected to subscribe to the official distributing website. I mentioned funny, because the licence allows re-use, modification and re-distribution. No need to say that there are several locations which are not terribly difficult to find that host the same file for free download. I understand that the developer no longer had sufficient time to do component maintenance, and therefore partnered with a commercial party, but to me this makes no sense at all. Download for free and pay a subscription fee for professional support would and certainly would prevent a wild growing amount of unofficial download locations and clearly focus on where to get paid support.

Screenshot of VerySimpleDesigns.com
Screenshot of VerySimpleDesigns.com

We also re-structured the site layout. Not so much the sections and categories, as we did that right from the start. But Joomla hosts the images a bit deep in the file structure: images/stories/… This bothered me, as I do want the images indexed, and I carefully named all of them prior to upload. But I am also a sorting freak – I love to have clear structures, so I happily created a few more sub-directories, which in retrospect are not search engine friendly at all. So back to the drawing board…

So we changed the image location and made sure it is not more than 2 levels deep. We made the directory accessible by the crawlers, so that the images will be indexed.

We carefully inspected the used meta-tags, and sofar we only used single word keywords, and no search phrases. Some work to do there. We created a target keyword list and used Google’s Adwords to generate possible keywords based on the site URL. Funny how the word illustration in an Inkscape tutorial leads to a full list of “Illustrator tutorials” and variations thereof tho. We do not want to draw people to the site with intentionally selected “skewed keywords”. You know.. you use a phrase that gets people to the site, but you are not offering whatever they searched for. We do not use Illustrator (or hardly ever) and tho the tutorials can easily be translated to this vector editor, we provide them now for Inkscape, so the Inkscape user is our main target. So we use Inkscape tutorials :D. Anyways, there is a lot more content to upload and more articles to write, and having a keyword list allows us to focus on a limited set that will eventually result in more traffic to the site.

Google’s webmaster tools let us know about crawl errors and provides HTML suggestions. In this case “duplicate metatag descriptions”, referring to pages where we left the meta-tag empty. More work to do! But the tools are awesome and give us clear indications what’s amiss.

Writing tutorials is not always easy

Syllie

Geez! It was not so much the tutorial actually, as the problem of getting it published decently. I guess that is my own fault, as I used a “quick fix” by using some else’s template design. Numbers: not visible, pagination: horrible, separation into sections: ugly… So i did some further template tweaking and I made a HUGE mental note to make a proper Joomla template from sketch. I bet it will be material for a tutorial too *grins*. My list of wishes for components is slowly growing too… so a good time to start working on that.

Inkscape tutorial - fashionable woman
Inkscape tutorial - fashionable woman

Anyways… back to the tutorial. It is again for Inkscape. I decided to do something a bit more advanced (tho due to lack of details I still think it qualifies as a very simple design). My mate Dakka proof read it, and said “I hope you do not consider this a beginner tutorial, because you lost me after the first sentence”. And he is right there, it is not a beginner tutorial, but he is quite an advanced graphics designer, and altho he has zero experience in Inkscape, it should not look scary to him. So there.. I went back to the drawing table and included some more clues, hints and tips. I think that anyone just above beginner level should be able to follow it now, and I also wrote an article which gives some clues how to start for an absolute beginner in Inkscape.

The tutorial is a walkthrough on how to create a fashion design, a fashionable woman blowing away some flowers, in vintage colours so it has a bit of a retro style to it. It is based on a stock photo and done in Inkscape. Check it out at verysimpledesigns.com.