Archive for the 'Web Design' Category

• 06.05.07 Fine Tuned 404 posted in Web Design

  As part of the Circle Six redesign, I culled the portfolio and in the process broke just about every link that Google had indexed. A new sitemap and some redirect pages are taking care of SEO, but in the interim, a lot of visitors are getting 404 pages. So I borrowed a tip from the blog and added a suggest feature to the C6 404 page…

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• 06.04.07 Moving Wordpress 2 posted in Web Design, Geekery

  Here’s round 2 of my Wordpress Move script from yesterday. It now figures out if your home address is different from your base url and if so, it strips the path off of the home address and appends it to the new base url to create a new home address. This makes the assumption that both your url and home are on the same domain. I’d be interested to know if anyone finds other uses for this or if there are any feature requests. If not, it’s serving my purposes and probably won’t go any further, but you never know.

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• 06.03.07 Shorter Twitter Sidebar Links posted in Web Design, Geekery

  A quick note for people using Twitter and Wordpress. You’ve probably noticed that nasty problem I was having where the twitter sidebar links were overlapping the blog’s main text on the front page when twitter failed to tinyurl the link. Well, I fixed it…

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• 06.02.07 Moving Wordpress Faster posted in Web Design, Geekery

  I’ve got a new script, but it has a very limited usage. I built it because I develop a lot of sites on my laptop using a local testing environment. In order to test my sites in VirtualBox with Internet Explorer, I have to use my local IP as the url for my Wordpress sites. Which means I end up changing the url and home address of the sites pretty often, sometimes directly through mySQL after I’ve already switched location. So here’s my solution…

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• 06.01.07 Semantic Details posted in Web Design

  When we did our Circle Six redesign, it was important to me that we go out of our way to make this our most semantic and accessible site yet. Clean, semantic code was the goal, and here are some details that we considered that you may want to keep in mind for your next project…

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• 05.29.07 Speeeeed posted in Web Design, Website Updates

  Did you notice? The blog is WAY faster than it was yesterday. I got my CSS compressed with Marco’s plugin, my javascript optimized, compressed and re-ordered, and my pages being served with gzip compression. Man, what a difference. My page load times cut in half. Read on for a few tricks I learned today…

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• 05.29.07 Wordpress Optimization posted in Web Design

  I’m going to take a “back-to-work” break after the long weekend and let my friend Marco do the blogging today. He’s got a great article on some things that anyone can do to optimize their Wordpress site (or any site), and it includes a few things I hadn’t heard before. Also included in the article is a great new plugin that he wrote, called WP-CSS-Streamliner, which will take all of the CSS files linked in each page, combine them in the order they were linked, optimize them, gzip-compress them and serve them up before any javascript is loaded. This is especially great if you’re running anything like Extended Live Archives or WP-Lightbox, which stick their own CSS files into the head. It’s running right now on the main C6 site, and although it comes with no guarantees, it’s working great. Check it out: On a quest for the ultimate website performance.

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• 05.28.07 Ajax Usability: Tab History posted in Web Design

  Today’s tip gleaned from my experience in building the latest Circle Six Design website is more of a hint, or suggestion, than a how-to. It’s mostly about javascript, and my javascript is pretty crazy for this, mostly because I’m not very experienced with javascript and it’s kind of hacked. However, what I got working is worth sharing…

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• 05.26.07 Storing a Query posted in Web Design

  I’ve finally “finished” the C6 website to my satisfaction and am ready to start blogging a little more regularly. I thought I’d kick it off with a new series on “how I did it” and reveal a few techniques I learned/developed in the process of making the new site. Today I’m going to go over the last one I figured out: Storing a Wordpress database query while you run a second one on a page…

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• 05.24.07 Finally Finished, Almost posted in Web Design, Website Updates

  I finally went live with the new version of the Circle Six Design site. It’s pretty heavy on the prototype.js with a lot of custom effects, but it’s completely valid and works just fine if you turn off javascript ;). It’s pretty much custom code from the ground up, still based on Wordpress, of course. I had a lot of fun doing this one and I’d love to know what you think!

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