I have one freelance project thats about 2/3 the way through and another that I’ve nearly finished mocking up the homepage. The latter I’m very excited about, it looks real nice and I’m hoping it’ll be one that I’m really proud of. I’ve spent alot of time on the colour palette this time, trying lots of blends and always trying to stick to what the client wanted. I’ll show you a peak of the mock up when I’ve finalised it.

I’m also waiting on news of a big project  that may be in the pipline and then after that I’m going to try and have the summer off doing any freelancing and enjoy some free time and also really get my knowledge up on jQuery…the main area I now want to master.

I’ve also been getting shed loads of enquiries lately for e-commerce work (my two current projects are both ecommerce sites). I use the wp-ecommerce plugin from the guys at instinct. I am now showcased on their new site – getshopped.org as a developer and the City Surf site I did is also on there.

I still want to redesign my entire site at some point to be more services oriented and make use of new stuff I’ve learned. I really think you’ll agree that the blog looks like shit…it was an after thought when I re-jigged the main site. It will be done at some point though.

General look & feel -

I changed all the colours, graphics and backgrounds. It now looks slightly more retro which is what I wanted.

The homepage layout -

This was the main driver for the overhaul. I did this mainly because I thought it looked a little thrown together before. Now I think it looks alot neater and each element holds its own space better.

Typography -

I really wanted to use Typekit and play around with fonts and thought my site would be a good place to play around with it. For the H tags I’m using FF Meta Small Caps Web Pro and for the body text I’m using Proxima Nova.

CSS3 -

I’m now using some CSS3 styles in my site. Border radius to round off some of the boxes and text shadow on the H tags.

Progressive enhancement -

The H tag font I used looked a little weak in IE without the text shadow so I use a conditional style that changes all  of those tags to use Georgia instead. It’s quite a contrast to have the very bold sans-serif font in Firefox etc and then have the thin serif typeface in IE…but it actually works ok. I may play around with it soon though just to get some consitency across  all browsers.

Things to do…

The main thing I really need to do do is sort out this blog. It kind of got themed based on the main site and still has some areas of concern. Mainly the font layout in the posts needs addressing. jQuery – I use a few jQuery files on this site and I think there are some issues in IE7 that I need to sort out.

I have more ideas on how to development my site and use it mainly as a canvas to try out new things so stay tuned for more.

The truth is I have never had anything worthy of blogging about. I decided long ago that I didn’t want to just write about stuff, I wanted to write about design, the web, technology. Its only now I feel that I know enough about this stuff to actually write about it. With this blog I want to be able to give MY opinion and take on things, share my knowledge and more importantly learn from the community of designers out there who will hopefully find my blog of interest. But every now and then though I might pop some things of personal of interest on here that are not to do with web design.

Anyway, this is my new site. Am I happy with it? Yes, well to a degree. I needed to update the old site pretty quick for many reasons. I have learned so much since I made the last one I felt I was selling myself short. With the new site I like the fact that it brings in alot of this new stuff that I’ve learnt – CSS and Photoshop techniques, new stuff like jQuery, more understanding of layout and typography and last but not least WordPress. WordPress is massive to me right now and I know that fellow WordPressians feel the same way too. I’ll be definately talking about this alot more in further posts so I’ll leave it there for now.

If I had more time I’m sure it would’ve looked different but I’m fine with it. I’m never pleased but I’m okay with that. I know I still have a lifetime of learning this trade and if I was completely happy with the new site it would mean that I’m no longer pushing myself.

There are a few small bugs going on with it that I need to sort out. They’re not enough to stop it working so I can get these fixed as I go. The main (and only one really) is that the rss feed doesn’t work. I get this error…

I have looked around a lot and know its to do with blank spacing in the php. I ran the fix rss plugin and it seemed to do something but the feed still doesn’t work. I know its not the theme or the plugins either…can anyone help?

Well I think that’ll do for my first post. Please feel free to leave any comments on the new website. I’d don’t know many designers personally an so it will be appreciated. A site I use alot is Chris Coyiers’ CSS Tricks – it’s great and I would struggle without it. One aspect I like is how he runs through the process of designing a site from scratch. It’s given me inspiration and so soon I’ll be writing a post on how I built this site. I’ll be talking about everything I used, how I did it, why I did it and hopefully it’ll be useful to someone.

Peace.