web design Archives

Does Your Website Have a 404?
When people try to visit a page on your website that doesn’t exist, what happens? Do they reach a 404 page? If not, you’ll need to add this soon.

What is a 404 page?

The requested page could not be found but may be available again in the future (w3schools).

When a visitor goes to your website, they should get an error message that indicates that the content they were looking for isn’t at the page they landed on. Ideally, you will help them find something related to what they were looking for by presenting them with a search box and related items.

Awesome 404 Pages

Take a look at a few best-of 404 posts:
How to Make a 404 Page

To make a custom 404 page, you have a few options. First, your theme may have a 404 area to create your page:

If your theme doesn’t have that option, try using a WordPress plugin, like Custom 404.

Testing your 404 Error Page:

To test your 404 error page, add any extra address to the end of your domain, or visit yourdomain.com/404.
Also on:
June 20, 2014

Courtney Engle Robertson

WordPress

404, best practices, web design, web dev, wordpress
Planning Your Logo: You might need 2
When you are planning your new logo, it is important to keep in mind that you may need more than one option.

Planning Your Primary Logo

More than likely, you will be hiring out the work of actually designing your logo. A good designer will know key components about what makes a great logo and represents your brand well. However, what you get in exchange really matters.

Ask for the raw file of your logo in whatever program the designer used. Typically this will be a .psd Photoshop file. You may need to resize your logo, add it as part of another image (like a Facebook banner on your page) or integrate it in to your web design. By getting the original raw file, you will be able to resize as needed.

Planning Alternate Logos

Often primary logos are approximately rectangular. But, when you need to integrate that logo into a tiny thumbnail on Facebook or Twitter, you are now constrained to a square image. Google+ even makes the icon look like a circle instead of a square.

If your logo has a symbol in it, many choose to omit the text and just use the symbol. Attempting to squish the entire logo into a square may end up unreadable.

You may also use this square logo as your favicon. This icon is a shortcut from mobile devices, computers, and even displays in the tabs in your browser.

If you want to watermark any of your social images, you may also want a solid color (like white) version of your logo to display in a lower corner indicating your brand.

As you are planning, spare yourself some frustrations and have an alternate logo layout. You will thank me later.
Also on:
June 19, 2014

Courtney Engle Robertson

Social Media

Graphic design, logo, social media, web design, web development, wordpress
WordPress 3.9 Preview

Big changes have been announced upcoming for WordPress 3.9, due out April 15.

Changes to the WYISIWIG editor – TinyMCE

When you want to format your text, you know that you WordPress Post Editor has buttons to help you. That editor is known as TinyMCE. At times, the editor can be a bit picky.

A long-standing issue has been if people compose their post in Microsoft Word and copy/paste text into WordPress. Until recently, they needed to pass that pasted text through the “Paste from Word” button to strip out unnecessary hidden code that Word left.

The upgrade to the text editor for now is mostly improving other code related issues that are less visible while things are working better. However, I’m keeping my eyes on the TinyMCE table tool. I hope that this will be implemented in a responsive manner. Until then, avoid using tables.

Widget Management to Live Previews:

When an editor wants to see, change, and arrange widgets, it hasn’t been easy to find them relative to the pages the widgets are on. Now you can preview these widgets within the theme customizer. This feature was first developed as a plugin.

Headers:

You now have the ability to upload, crop, and manage header images, without needing to leave the preview. Previously, you needed to upload the images in the media area before changing them in the theme customizer.

Themes:

When selecting a new theme, you can now Browse in full size mode and view theme details.

Galleries:

Galleries can be a great way to show several images at once. However, once you insert those images into the editor, you can’t see them again really until you preview or publish your post. That seems terribly inefficient. Now, you can preview galleries in the editor.

VS:

Drag & Drop Images

While we’ve been able to drag & drop images into the media uploader for some time, we haven’t been able to drag them right into the post editor. Finally we can do this, which should save lots of mouse-clicks to get into the editor.

Select thumbnail crop

While editing photos, you now can select what you want to be the thumbnail crop. This is great when you have a wide image that selected an odd size for your thumbnails (especially when becoming a preview on your /blog page).

Replace images

Also in the editing of photos, you can now swap out an image and replace it with a different one within the post editor. This does not yet seem to let you replace the image inside the media library with a new one.

Playlists: Audio & Video

I hesitate to mention the audio and video playlists. For a long time, it’s been drilled into my head that you should never host your audio or video content on the same server as your website. If someone goes back through time and does a download of lots of content, that can suddenly slow your server down considerably.

Likewise, many hosts have an imposed media upload file size that audio should be okay with, but video files can be larger than the threshold easily.

To create a playlist, add media, upload, and select create playlist:

Once you’ve added it and published your post, it will look list this:

WordPress 3.9 is due out in April.

March 26, 2014

Courtney Engle Robertson

WordPress

web design, web development, wordpress
What do i need to get a website created – pt 2.
We discussed in Part 1 the need to be clear about the content of your site. The next need to identify is what to build your site on.

Website setup changes

Content management systems make creating, updating, and maintaining websites more user-friendly. Originally creating a website was a hard task. It required creating graphic design, cutting it apart like a jig-saw puzzle, then using software like Frontpage or Dreamweaver to make the html code, and then uploading all that to a web server. (Or, even further back: learning plain html code in a basic text editor – think: creating a website from Notepad).

Then, if you wanted your site updated, often it required paying the web-designer an additional fee.

Content management systems have changed this process. Now, if you can use a web-based email account, like Gmail, and a web-based calendar, you can update your own website.

What are Content Management Systems?

Most Content Management Systems are open source. This means, they are free, and have a large community of programmers and developers that freely update and create improvements to the system.

The advantage to using an open-source content management system compared to a private label service is in the numbers of people that you can contact for support, should you decide to leave your current provider.

Why should I use a Content Management System (CMS)?

While it may still require hiring a web developer to install and set your site up, as well as a designer to create a custom look to your site, and maybe even a copywriter to help on the “static” pages, using a website content management system will make updating your site yourself, or having a specific person/department in your company do this work much more efficient.

List of Open Source Content Management Systems (cms):
1. WordPress (originally created for blogging, but now functions to host an entire site)
2. Drupal (ideal for large scale websites with high functionality)
3. Joomla
In the next post, we’ll review the advantages and disadvantages of each content management system, and ensuring your webhost can support your choice.
January 4, 2010

Courtney Engle Robertson

Social Media

cms, content management system, open source cms, open source content management system, web design, web development, webhost, website hosting