May 15th, 2008
Wrapping up my Wordpress kick (for now), I recently did another custom wordpress theme job where I was asked to add breadcrumbs. I didn’t know how to do this and so spent a good amount of time researching. Turns out there are a few plugins out there which will do the trick, but the one that worked best for me was …
May 12th, 2008
Another challenge I had when creating the Wordpress theme for Rose Edge LLC was that I needed to create a couple of custom includes, and I didn’t know how to do that. I needed a space on the sidebar where Kristin could update her Upcoming Event area. I didn’t want to have to teach her how to go into the backend code and edit sidebar.php. Next I needed a way for her to edit the “Insight Flash” that appears on her home page. I had already found a way to use the Excerpt as a secondary source of content - I needed another solution.
May 9th, 2008
I am by no means a Wordpress expert, but I do use it for this site and I have built a few custom themes for others. Recently I came across an interesting problem while creating the Wordpress theme for Rose Edge LLC: I needed to have two separate content areas and Wordpress only provides one. If you look at the design, I needed my client to be able to control the content in the “highlight box” (the green box at the top) and the “content area” (the blue box below). These could not be part of the same post info because of all the code that is in between them (which defines the visual break between the two. I didn’t want my client to have to insert code into the middle of every post. What to do?
It occurred to me that Wordpress already has two ways to pull in content: The Post (called in your template with <?php the_content(); ?>) and The Excerpt (called in your template with <?php the_excerpt(); ?>). Since my client wasn’t using Wordpress as a blog, but rather as a CMS, she wasn’t using The Excerpt at all. Could she use it instead as a secondary content area? Well, yes … but not without some plugins and modifications.
May 8th, 2008
For my first installment of “I discover, you discover” this one is hot off the presses of about an hour ago.
OK, so it’s a small annoyance but one that irks me nonetheless. Whenever I go to open a .psd file I always have to right-click and then choose “Open With” and then choose Photoshop. I’d simply prefer to have .psd files always open in Photoshop. I poked around a bit and figured out how to do it.
May 8th, 2008
Well, if there’s anyone left lurking around here I’m sure you’ve noticed that this blog has been all but dead for the past year (6 posts in a year … lame). But I’ve been busy! I’ve had a lot of work, I bought my first house, I’ve been acting (community theater), dancing (salsa!), singing (joined a chorus), and of course there’s my family … life has been full and wonderful! But I missed the blog.
So I’ve been gearing up to get back to it for a while now but it seems like since the inception of Sheriar Designs the blogs about web design have increased exponentially almost daily. With the plethora of awesome information out there and limited free time on my part, I felt a bit constrained by the format I had set out for myself years ago - that I would distinguish myself by writing in-depth articles about my processes. Those were some seriously time-consuming articles!
So I kept my desire to return percolating and an idea emerged.
May 5th, 2008
I just completed the design and development of Rose Edge LLC for Kristin Rose, who does motivational speaking, healing, and coaching.
October 9th, 2007
Remember when, for a five-section graphic nav bar we would have 15 images … five images for the Off state, five images for the Hover state, and five images for the On state? And then we cleverly had just five images - one for each section - in which we combined the Off, Hover, and On states? Well lately I’ve been taking this trend to it’s logical conclusion … one image for everything. That’s right, for everything.
Using background positioning in CSS, this is actually pretty easy to accomplish. Now you only have one image to create, and it has the extra bonus of taking care of any pesky little IE flicker problems. Here’s how to do it …
September 21st, 2007
I recently had a really great experience doing some design / xhtml / css tweaking for a great up and coming web application – iMoondo.
This job was simply a pleasure from start to finish. Andrej Masiar was just so fun and easy to work with … one of those clients you want to stay on the phone chatting with after your done talking about work stuff. Andrej has some key characteristics that make up a great client that I’m going to keep in mind when trying to replicate that type of client. They are:
September 7th, 2007
If you freelance then you’ve many times guesstimated the time you’ve spent on projects. You’ve often had a nagging suspicion that you’ve either overcharged a client or cheated yourself. Recently I’ve discovered a little web app that has put an end to those issues for me.
June 14th, 2007
A few months ago I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Annie Potts (think Ghostbusters and Toy Story) and my friend James Taylor perform in the critically acclaimed A. R. Gurney play Love Letters in my home town of Walnut Creek, California. My super-awesome and oldest friend in the world, Selma Al-Faqih, was the director. I had never seen the play before and was completely enthralled!
This summer Annie, James, and Selma are bringing Love Letters to Washington, D.C. and I am very pleased to have done the promotional website for that performance at the Landsburgh Theatre. If you have a chance to go, I highly recommend it.
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