Author: admin

WordPress starter frameworks (free)

admin

WordPress starter frameworks (free)

  1. Roots
    Roots is a starting WordPress theme made for developers that’s based on HTML5 Boilerplate, Blueprint CSS (or 960.gs) and Starkers that will help you rapidly create brochure sites and blogs. It has a bunch of excellent tweaks to WordPress, plus support for the best CSS frameworks including Foundation and 1140 Grid. This is a solid theme framework that is constantly updated and used by many developers, you cannot go wrong with it.
    Read More

Web Development – Tools of the Trade

admin

What is what and why should I use it?

Javascript Frameworks

  1. Node.js Node.js (Node) is an I/O environment built on top of Google Chrome’s JavaScript runtime — essentially, a server-side implementation of JavaScript. Node’s asynchronous, event-driven I/O model makes it easy for developers with JavaScript knowledge to build high-performing, scalable, and highly concurrent web applications rapidly and run them in the cloud. Node.js uses an event-based server execution procedure rather than the multithreaded execution in PHP.Beginner’s Guide to Node.js Read More

Develop an Information Architecture for a complex website

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Information Architecture

From: Information Achitecture Resource Pack

Information Architecture involves the organisation of information into a structure that helps people find the information they need. To achieve this on a website, the designer needs to consider:

  • The purpose of the website
  • How the website content can achieve this purpose
  • How to organise the content to ensure it is easy to navigate
  • How to ensure that the website content can be easily maintained

Developing website Information Architecture is an important early step in the overall design and development process. Read More

Grunt

admin

So, people seem to be exited about something called ‘Grunt’…

Let’s explore.

From the Grunt website:

  • Why should you use a task runner like Grunt?
    In one word: automation. Automation of what? Well, such repetitive tasks as: minification, compilation, unit testing, linting etc.
  • Why Grunt?
    The Grunt ecosystem is huge with hundred of plugins. Coffeescript, handlebars, jade, JS Hint, {less}, require.js. SASS, Stylus etc.

Read More

Don't make me think (Kruger)

Don’t make me Think

admin

Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t make me think’  is a classic in the world of web design. I recently pulled the 2006 print from my book shelf to give it a (first) read. And it was worth it!

This is what stayed with me the most (ordered by chapter):

  1. Don’t make me think

    – Remove as much as possible the ‘question marks’ (Where am I, Where can I find, What does this mean
    – Make things self-evident, or if this is not possible, self-explanatory

  2. How we really use the web

    – We don’t read, we scan. (I like this analogy: web users tend to act like sharks: they have to keep moving or they’ll die)
    – We satisfice (choose the first reasonable option)
    – We muddle through
    Read More

Rockstar WP – Theming

admin
  • When designing a theme in PS, use different layers for different WP elements (e.g logo, page, featured_blog, featured, homecontent, footer, header etc)
  • Flow: design mockup -> transform to HTML -> add WP functionality
  • To show the boxes you can temporarily use a 1px red border
  • Quote: Finally because our <div> element has position:relative, we can now use  absolute positioning inside and set right:0px for the menu and it will be aligned to the right. This is great for a WordPress theme because as the person creates new pages the menu will extend, and this way it will stay right aligned.

Rockstar WP – A start

admin

Setup a WP site:

  • Set permalink to/%category%/%postname%/   (make sure rewrite_mod is enabled in Apache)
  • Choose a spam filter. Akismet is free for personal use, but minimal 5,-/m for business use
  • Install sitemap plugin: The Sitemap plugin automatically creates an XML sitemap prepared to Google’s specification and then contacts the Google servers every time you create a new post or change the sitemap.