Hi, yesterday saw the release of my latest wordpress template exclusively for ThemeForest. It’s a portfolio/blog template that is packed full of features and customisation options. I have put a massive effort in to get the options page the best it possibly can be with the option to change the look of the template by choosing colours and background images so you don’t need to even touch the code.

The template is split into two sections, the blog and the portfolio with 2 totally different layouts to give clear separation.

To take a look at the template you can visit the demo here and if you want more details or would like to purchase it (only $25!) then you can do so here.

Anyway back to the topic. They are getting together to create a new super search engine, hmm what was MSN search, then Live Search oh and then Bing. Come on Microsoft you’ve failed three times, you’re not going to succeed by teaming with another sucky search engine. When I produce an SEO optimised site I don’t care about any other search engine apart from Google and I’m guessing its the same for the rest of the web development community. The only reason we support Internet Explorer is because they force it upon their users so we don’t have a choice because they have an unfair advantage on the browser market.

“Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.”, BBC 2009

It’s clear to see that Microsoft is losing its dominatrix position in the marketplace and when you have companies that people actually like (eg, Google) you’ve got to take something from that. Google’s approach to business is perfect, it treats its staff and customers properly, Microsoft just doesn’t care about it customers, to them it’s just about money.

Anyway rant over, get back to work

This post represents my opinions.

For a while now I’ve known that to succeed you need to be around people that enable you and help you in that quest. The design community benefits from this to no end, and because the community is very active on social networking platforms there is no reason not to be part of it.

There are thousands of great designers out there using sites like Twitter and Facebook. Following and contributing to discussions can only help you get out there, get noticed and feel part of the community. I cant tell you the amount of times I’ve come across people that see no point in Twitter until you start mentioning how you’ve received work, gotten help on an issue and so much more. Just take a look at my twitter feed and you’ll see just how many times I ask questions rather than sitting for hours staring at a PHP problem, getting frustrated and having to take time out, I simply put the question on twitter and within a few minutes I have a number of people who know the answer.

Over the past few days I’ve been working on the design for my next ThemeForest theme and throughout the design stage I decided that I would put it up online for people to see, test and give their opinions on (and of course I run Review My Design which serves that purpose as well). I have had a number of people who have been a very important part of the development of the template design, with ideas on backgrounds, colours, alignment, spacing, jQuery effects, fonts etc. and now I’m going into development knowing that the design has been polished and tested.

So the point of this post is really to say that if you don’t use Twitter and you’re a designer, start looking into it and getting involved, there’s no point sitting on the wall about it and saying “I don’t see the point in it” when you haven’t tried it. Being part of a community is so important to succeed, if I wasn’t part of the design community with this blog, my twittering, my themeforesting, my freelanceswitching, my wootheming and everything else I do, then I think I’d still be working my ass at such a low rate and not improving my skills.

Anyway, back on topic, the guys that create those little banner ads you see on websites, they tend not to be in the same position but after seeing a rather impressive ad the other day, maybe some should. I never normally click on adverts on websites because I know exactly what happens but I strongly recommend that you click on this advert: http://awardshome.com/cannes2009/pringles/can-hands.html

It’s advertising Pringle’s (my favourite crisps [chips to my American readers]), but in a rather ingenious manner. See they know that most people aren’t going to see an advert in a sidebar of a website and think “I know what I’ll click that” so they play on that idea and “talk” to you, with phrases like: “BTW, thanks for trusting our banner not to send you to a porn site”.

It’s nice to see when good adverts appear, it doesn’t happen very often, so here are a few of my favourites.

Dairy Milk Gorilla Advert

Compare The Market

Oh and for those in the UK that saw this Bravia advert, this spoof is soooo funny:

Long Brown Folio

Long Brown Folio is a one-page portfolio website template that scrolls smoothly between each section. It uses various shades of the same colour to create a simple yet slick style and large typography to separate each section.

For full details click here.

Big Header Folio

Big Header Folio is a wordpress template produced in 5 different colours, brown, gray, blue, green and orange. It’s aimed at providing designers with a place to showcase their work as well as the option to post their own blog with ease.

For full details click here.

folioDelight

folioDelight has been a great seller on ThemeForest over the last month. It’s a portfolio/blog template for wordpress designed to showcase your work whilst providing a place for you to get your thoughts across through your own blog.

For full details click here.

I have a number of templates in the works over the next few months so please subscribe to the blog RSS and I’ll post them up as and when I release them.

So why am I going back to that? I hear you wonder…

Well, as great as having a separate office was, for one person it just didn’t feel right. I’m the kind of guy that likes to work at 1am in the morning or 1pm in the afternoon, when I feel motivated to work I want to be able to work. Having your work life and personal life separated meant that this wasn’t possible. If I wanted to do work from home I’d have to set up GoToMyPC or download the files I needed to my thumb drive, get home and then realise I forgot something. When I was suddenly inspired to do a design I wouldn’t be able to because I didn’t have the software at home, this has now resulted in me having a few hundred hand drawn designs of sites I probably wont ever get round to actually doing.

So my office is now in my nice new apartment, I have everything in one place and now I really need to make sure that I’m motivated to work. Today was my first proper day at work for the past few weeks (been moving) and I did quite a lot today so hopefully motivation wont be an issue now. There are distractions at the moment though, thank you very much Wimbledon and extremely nice weather .

I look forward to getting an office again soon, I’ll wait until I’m employing though. Oh and sorry about the quality of the image, I took it on my iPhone. And what do you think of the new design? I wanted to create a nice homely warm site and I really wanted to use that wood texture somewhere.

Now that I have gotten on top of my client work I was able to spend a bit of time developing a new template for ThemeForest. So as a result I am proud to release Tabfolio.

Tabfolio is a HTML/CSS portfolio template driven by jQuery. The use of jQuery has enabled me to add a horizontal accordion to preserve screen space and give the site a nice sense of user interactivity. There are 3 tabs which when clicked hide the current tab and fade in the new tab. Clicking on an item under my work would change the portfolio item in focus. It uses unordered lists so that it know which item to show when you click an item link on the right.

The template comes in 4 styles, the grayscale style you see above and then in red, green and blue. The PSD files are provided for each style so that you can change the look if you wish. It also displays everything nicely if the user doesn’t have JavaScript, instead of messing up it will simply list the portfolio items and then stack the about and contact sections directly underneath.

The template is available for sale for just $10, over at ThemeForest, click here to view the theme page.

I have been running Codethatdesign for about 9 months and in that time I have built up a number of regular clients and am continuing to get new clients on a daily basis so it has been a triumph. However, the site has remained pretty much the same in all that time, so over the past month or so I have been working on a facelift.

As it is a coding service, it was imperative that it followed coding standards and the code itself and the items in the portfolio were top notch, so I have spent a lot of time developing it to ensure that it as effective as possible to potential clients.

As many of you will know, I am an avid user of jQuery and this doesn’t change on this site, I have used it on the homepage to create a tab like section so that it makes good use of screen real estate and on the portfolio so I can demonstrate my best work in the best possible way. However, when using JavaScript, you should always think of the users that don’t have it enabled, for this reason the site is fully functional without Javascript. I inevitably coded the site for non-Javascript users and then added CSS through the Javascript for the people that have it enabled, this way the site will work perfectly either way.

I kept the site itself simple with all the information required spaced out nicely so its easy to read and clear where each section is. I used a warm blue background to give contrast to the content area and used tabs for the navigation of the site. I used an Apple influenced style with the images offset into the bottom right corner on both the homepage and the portfolio and used image substitution for the headings.

Overall, I think the new site is effective in providing a user friendly and professional design with the functionality to showcase my skills as a coder/developer so that potential clients can make an informed decision of whether to hire me or not and of course I think it’s a vast improvement on the old site.

For the past couple of months I have been working with a fantastic graphic designer based in New York, Eric Nunlee. He came to me with a brilliant design that he wanted to be integrated with Wordpress and I took on the challenge, it was by far one of the biggest projects I had taken on so it was exciting.

The blog would incorporate my three specialties and favourite areas to work in, which is Wordpress, jQuery and portfolio design/presentation.

The main motive of the site was to build a brand around the freelancer, this would be achieved by displaying his work (portfolio/projects etc.) along with his personal blog and social endevours (twitter/facebook etc.). It meant that he could express himself throughout the site whilst keeping it available for potential clients to check out his work.

I used jQuery to really give the site an extra push, to enable good use of screen real estate and to really make the experience much nicer for the user. Visitors are able to scroll through his latest works in the sidebar for instance or they are able to send him a link of interest without leaving the page or they can share a post by simply clicking a share button which displays a nice little in-design window, its all very nice but to really do it justice you need to check it out: http://ericnunlee.com

The site has 3 main areas; the blog, the portfolio and the working on sections as well as the usual (About, Contact pages etc.)

The Blog

The blog forms the main part of the homepage, it allows Eric to show his personal side, clients like to have a friendly relationship with their contractors and this really allows the clients to see what Eric is like as a person. The blog on portfolio’s is also very common now as a way of drawing visitors in and for SEO purposes, it will allow him to build up a visitor base who may at some point need a website so in the long run could equate to contracts.

A few features I have added to the blog include the options to share the post via social bookmarking sites, email the post to a friend, customized comments in keeping with the style of the blog and the option to easily add posts to the appropriate area on the sidebar as to intice the visitor to keep navigating through the site.

There was also a page named Writings (the above screenshot) which would allow the user to navigate through the archives easily with each post displayed under its month and the months set up in an accordion style, the user could then choose a month and it would scroll down to show the posts under that month.

The Portfolio and Working On Sections

The Portfolio and Working On sections are where the prospective clients are going to be focusing their attention on so it needed to be simple and really demonstrate his work in the best possible way. To do this we added a simple layout whereby we had the works categorized by Print, Web and Identity and the selected pieces under each heading, the user could then choose the piece of work and it would display on the right. Each work could have a number of screenshots which could be scrolled through with the use of buttons directly below it. I used a plugin in the backend of Wordpress in order to try and streamline the process of adding information and images easily so as to help Eric make the most out of the Wordpress system.

Conclusion

Just a final note, this kind of site (portfolio as part of a blog) is something that I am seeing a lot nowadays, freelancers don’t want to come across as businesses, we want to come across as people and the more you can show that you are individual and part of the design community through things like Twitter and other social platforms, the more you are representing yourself as an expert in the field. At the end of the day, although there needs to be a level of professionalism when dealing with businesses, you’ll be working with one person. I cant tell you the number of times I have had a professional client (business) coming to me and then I start dealing with one person over IM or the phone and it becomes informal and friendly, that’s the way that I work and what seems to be the way most freelancers work nowadays, we can leave the suits at the design agencies to come across as the professional businesses.

And finally, I really enjoyed working on this project, it strengthened my skills in Wordpress further and allowed me to work with a great designer who I got on very well with, so the project was hassle free. I am and the client is very happy with the outcome so the project was hailed a success.

A couple of years ago if someone said I should get a mac I would say s/he was wrong, Macs are crap yadda yadda yadda. Last year I bought a cheap iBook for about £150 off of eBay, it was slow, nothing worked with it and I felt that it proved my opinions.

About a year later I bought an iPhone when it came out on Pay As You Go for £350. At the time I was really excited about having a new gadget and now about 6 months on I don’t think I could live without it.

Now I am not a Windows user, I gave up with Windows when they bought out Vista and knew that Windows was over. I moved to Ubuntu Linux, everything worked fast without problems, it looked great with technologies like Compiz, everything is free and open source, however it is not an operating system for a designer. It has some great software such as The Gimp but try opening a clients PSD design in The Gimp and you’ll realise you need to have Photoshop, which means you have to use Windows or Mac (I ran it in a virtual machine in the end).

Last Sunday I traveled to Manchester to the Apple store with the intention of buying my mac and about a week later I can see its attraction in the design community, its fast, everything works on it and software is written for it especially for designers, for example: Coda. I have been using it for just a few days and it makes my coding so much easier. Also having Photoshop running on the same operating system as everything else saves me so much time and because most of the popular software works on a Mac I’m able to test my clients sites in all the browsers without having to go onto virtual machines and other computers.

As you can see from the picture above, I bought the Mac Mini because I wanted to use my screen, keyboard and mouse (I really don’t like the Mac peripherals). So now I publicly retract my words about the Mac, its a great operating system (the systems are a bit overpriced though).