Web Design, Programming, and BusinessGoogle recently updated their Material Design specification with the added bonus of the new Material Design Iconic Font. These are free to use under the Creative Common Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). This means you can do just about anything you’d like with these icons (Google would enjoy having attribution it isn’t necessary). The icons are available to you in a number of...
To soft launch or hard launch, that is the question! To which you may say, “Hold on a second there buster! That is not the question. The question, the FIRST question, is what is a soft , or for that matter, a hard launch?” Yes, but of course! In the most general sense: A soft launch is often used by a company when it seeks to release its product or service without a lot of fan fare...
Who doesn’t love bacon? Ok, lots of people but I certainly love it. I’ve been using the bacon filler text for years thanks to Bacon Ipsum. The old standby for wireframes and design mockups is to use “Lorem Ipsum” but I find that Bacon Ipsum is much tastier. You can copy their filler text into your designs but they now have a few additional options that you may not know...
It has been well over a year since Google Reader said goodbye. While many of us have moved on to brighter RSS Feed Reader pastures some of us may just be getting around to searching out a great new RSS Feed Reader. What makes a great RSS Feed reader? Simplicity of use, ease of subscription transfer, mobile and web readiness are a few items that come to mind. We recently spent some time...
Sliders, otherwise known as a carousel, or image slider, are ubiquitous throughout the web. If you’ve spent any time designing or developing websites than you’ve more than likely implemented a website slider or two. The debate over the use of sliders in websites has been raging for some time. Spend a few minutes Googling and you will easily find innumerable arguments for and against...
It’s easy to forget about the “small” details when we’re neck deep in code, styling, and image creation (You know, all the meaty, fun-to-do aspects of your WordPress projects). It’s the “small” details that can really add up to make a major impact on your WordPress site. What is this small stuff? Theme Performance Optimization! Theme performance optimization sounds more...
As site owners and administrators, we understand the importance of creating quality content that has been SEO optimized. We have important information to share and we want that information to make it to the top of search results! Here’s the situation: you’ve spent some quality time researching your keywords and you’ve polished your content to maximize search results. Great! So...
If you work with WordPress you probably have a good idea what I’m going to write about today just from the title: formatting issues when switching between the visual and text editor. For those whom may not be familiar let me give you a quick scenario to describe what I’m writing about: You’re a developer/designer working in WordPress. Beyond chiseling out the shape of your...
Stock images: We all know the standard big dogs when it comes to purchasing stock photos for our websites and other creative content. But what about when we’re simply mocking up a document, image asset, or working on a staging site? We always want our work to look its best and we are often in a position where the client has yet to provide image assets, or to even provide a direction...
Imagine this scenario: You’re looking to shop online for a brand new whatchamacallit. You Google it up, get a list of links, and select one of the first that appears relevant. Then you wait as the page chokes and crawls along in a frozen state while the images are being loaded. Within five seconds you jump back to Google and select a different link. It works great. The page loads almost...
Web Design, Programming, and Business
Professionally building websites since 2002, I've worked at Microsoft, multiple agencies, and a few web design businesses of my own, including White Whale Web, a Boise-based web development agency. Previously, I was an owner of Thrive Web Designs from 2015 to 2022. I've taught classes, run design groups and even ran a benefit auction for 4 years in my free time. I love sharing and giving back to the web/creative community.