Tag Archives: Design

Do You Always Feel Like You Want to Start A New Project?

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I do.

Nearly everyday I have a new idea of something I’d like to build. Most of these are quasi-doable, while others stem from frustration and are pretty much impossible. Some ideas are:

  • local social music sites (ahem, hearDenton…still on the the very last back burner)
  • software that tracks drivers’ bad driving and penalizing them for it (maybe sending their stats to their insurance companies – also, not a project for me…I’m a web guy)
  • a site to compile LOTS of information on good worship songs (I started this and accidentally deleted…oh well)
  • a more stream-lined CMS solution built on WordPress
  • build a premium WordPress theme
  • turn the Shuttle design into a real theme

The list could go on. The point, though, is that I always have this feeling of wanting to accomplish another project. Of course I’m prevented by time mostly. If only I didn’t have to work full-time. One day…

So do you feel like this?

Thinking About the WordPress Admin Panel

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This week the WordPress team announced that a new admin panel is going to be implemented into the next release, 2.5.

Well, I’m pretty disappointed in the new design. What confuses me even more is that the overwhelming support for the Shuttle design seems to have been completely ignored, and instead, WordPress’ attention was put into a poor attempt at a color makeover (there seem to be some new features and re-organization, but really…).

Well I contacted Khaled (Shuttle designer) to see if he would want to partner with me in actually creating the Shuttle theme. I’d love to see Shuttle in use. How about you guys?

Lead Maverick – SEO Mothership

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As we get (re)started here on Develop Daly I’d like to begin by letting you know a little bit about what I do.

What I Do: Front-end web design/development for Lead Maverick

What Lead Maverick Does: Search Engine Optimization for small to mid-size businesses without changing their websites

As a plug, yet an non-sponsored advertisement, let me tell you what Lead Maverick can do for you.

In April the company was incorporated and the product released in summer 2007. The product being a directory that aggregates, optimizes, localizes, and organizes your content to make it more search-engine friendly. Basically customers use our tool to put content into our application and we spit that content back out into a directory where it all the magic takes place. Its really amazing how well it works too. We see results in less than 24 hours sometimes. Results being: search terms finding our content in number 1 rankings or at least top ten.

Right now my job is to redesign everything. Starting with the primary domain – you know, the home page and main company information and such – the marketing stuff. Very very soon we’ll be launching this and all that we do will make much more sense than the current website does. Following that the focuses of everyone will be on re-working the directory and the application. I’m really excited about this because its where we get to be innovative and bar-setting.

In addition to this, I’ve picked up lots of great SEO goodies. I’ll be sprinkling them about my blog every once in a while. Thanks for your subscription!

Easy Workflow for Site Creation – Yahoo! UI (YUI)

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It wasn’t long ago that I visited Yahoo!’s UI Library and thought to myself, “Why would I want to develop inside of grid and constrain myself like that?” More recently, however, I was re-introduced to the YUI and “forced” to use it. And guess what? Its not bad!

The benefits of using the YUI:

So in the short time I’ve been using it you can see that I’ve really come to like it. I suggest using this resource because at least you know that a team of professionals are getting paid to create this stuff and use it for their own company and are offering it open source. Plus 1 for Yahoo!.

Thanks to Arun Kale

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UPDATE: I’m not using this theme anymore, but it’s still a great theme. I’m using my own now :)

Arun is the creator of my current theme (The Morning After) and runs The Masterplan. I really love this theme. Design-wise its very simple (which is hard to find actually) and still offers very unique theme traits. For example, the idea of this theme is for a magazine site to use it and feature posts, write little notes, advertise, and be very content focused. I’m using it for those features as well, just to a lesser degree.

I’ll be creating a new theme soon, but while I’m still using this one I’d like to give credit where its due.

Homepage image from The Masterplan.