Business Logs – Page 31

AppleGazette Refreshed

Redesigning AppleGazette was no small feat, even though the design remains familiar to its regular customers. Visually, we had to strike a balance between paying homage to Apple’s design influence and maintaining the site’s own identity. The result is a cleaner, lighter, more streamlined, more modern approach to blog design. If there ever was a site to take advantage of CSS shadows, gradients, and rounded corners, AG was certainly the place to do it!

Like what we did with ForeverGeek, browsing through image attachments was another mandatory feature for our network blog—more sites should do this.

The next challenge was in integrating advertisements and special content—not just your typical banner ads, but specially formatted user-submitted news and app reviews featured in between posts. GravityForms and custom fields helped accomplish this. Another favorite tool in our utility belt was the Cycle plugin. And needless to say, we used the Genesis framework for this one.

Visit AppleGazette and see the new design live!

Designing in the browser with the Recipe Finder Blog

The just-launched Recipe Finder blog was a quick exercise of designing within the confines of the web browser. Usually the first step is to construct wireframes and head to Photoshop (or Fireworks, or even Illustrator) but in this case, it was more efficient to do straight-up coding.

First, the blog used graphic elements from the already-running Recipe Finder main site. Second, although the layout was different, there was no need to type up markup from scratch thanks to our WordPress theme framework of choice, Genesis. Lastly, any code that needed to be typed was simply copied and modified from previous sites we’ve worked on. Finding things to reuse is key.

Come check out the new Recipe Finder blog!

Erati Joins In

We at Splashpress Media are having a re-design bash and this time Erati has been called upon, dressed in a new and exciting look. Covering news, view and reviews in the Television industry, styled with a clean look.

We worked up a plan to tie together the content for a reader on the homepage so that it looks clean, professional, and easy to read. Since TV is a visual medium, using lots of images was a priority feature.

We have used the CartoGothic Std font by Fontsite.com and implemented it using the @font-face. The logo has been overhauled and different sections have been created for content for better navigation. We have yet again trusted the Genesis Theme Framework to handle our work.

Enjoy the new design at Erati!

Considering a theme framework?

Figuring out whether you should use a WordPress theme framework for your website is a balancing act of how much control you want to have over your theme code and how much you don’t have to write yourself.

Controlling Code

When you build a website, you usually start with the HTML and then add CSS. With a theme framework, the HTML (and WordPress PHP) already exists and you must approach it CSS Zen Garden style.Â Of course you can still override the code with hooks and filters provided by WordPress and the framework itself, but the question is, how far do you want to go?

Say you want to tweak the way the post date, author, and comments section of the page. In Genesis there’s a nifty shortcode format you can override with a filter:

post_date before="" post_author_posts_link post_comments post_edit

So that’s pretty easy to customize. However, say you’re not happy with the way comment pagination is being displayed and you want to wrap it around an if statement, which Genesis does not do. Unfortunately there’s no filter for that and you’ll have to copy-paste the entire chunk of code from genesis_do_comments() to override it.

All-in-one

Using frameworks also means you can work entirely out of functions.php (and style.css), which can be a good or bad thing for you. Good, because there’s only one file to refer to when looking to fix or edit code. Bad, because it’s all lumped in there. You can still use page templates, but that would usually mean redundant code, which defeats the purpose of using frameworks in the first place. Conditional tags are your friend.

Dependency

Finally, using a 3rd-party framework means you’re completely dependent on the underlying code, for better or worse. You won’t have to worry about updating the code when a new WordPress version gets released. But if the framework goes in a direction you’re not too thrilled about, becoming too bloated for your taste, then you’ll have to migrate to another framework and adapt your code all over again.

Starter themes & light frameworks

If you don’t need the bells and whistles (hooks and options) of a framework for your website, keep in mind that any WordPress theme can be a parent theme whose code you can inherit for your own theme. Try using Twenty Ten as your base template, or just copy/paste code and modify to your liking, no strings attached.

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