January 2010 has been a wirlwind of activities
With Vancouver gearing up for Olympic frenzy, I thought that everyone would have sat back and waited for the party to begin, but no.. It’s been crazy busy at Bluelime Media. So much so, that I totally missed track of January and now heading into February with yet another full plate. I’m not complaining though. Some of the projects we’ve worked on have been delightful.
During the holiday season, I took a stab at redesigning the kitsilano.ca blog. The original design was somewhat too constricting and Rob wanted a few features added. The greatest addition is the incorporation of random banners submitted by the community. If you ever find yourself in Kitsilano and snap a few pictures, simply upload them to flickr and tag them with kitsilanoca, and you never know, you’re picture may be used as a banner on the site.
We also completed a blog for Patricia Robitaille’s company, PR Strategies Inc. Being self-employed since 1993, Patricia’s wealth of knowledge on self-employment is incredibly valuable. Her blog will allow her to share tips and tricks with those wanting to learn more about self-employment.
Another self-employed colleague of ours, Bruce Clarke is president and co-founder of Superna Life Sciences which is a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the commercialization of treatments for niche diseases and indications, primarily hematology and oncology, in the Canadian marketplace. We built a simple, yet elegant website for Superna allowing them to promote their new venture and raise funds. The branding and design of the website were created by Johnny Kuan at Avenue Creative.
Next, we also collaborated with Splat Designs and built two websites for the Yaletown Laser Centre and Cosmetic Dentistry. Both sites used the same layout and look and feel but display different content. Building two sites at once was very efficient but also very confusing. More than once, I inserted the wrong image and content on the wrong site.
Last but not least, my on-going collaboration with Tzaddi at ThriveWire continued and we put together a WordPress site for the Vancouver Convention Centre’s Intranet. Unfortunately, this site is located on their own private server with no public access so we can’t show you anything. Working with the VCC’s IT team, we developed it on an IIS server which proved very challenging at times, but the the team at VCC is very happy with the end result and it will serve their company well.
The Minerva Foundation of BC gets a new look
During the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of working on a new website for the Minerva Foundation for BC Women. The Minerva Foundation offers a wide range of financial, emotional, educational, and leadership programs. Whether it’s helping women develop new skills, assist them to return to the workforce after an extended absence or providing community grants to other non-profit societies who provide services in the area of safety for women, the Minerva Foundation is a leader when it comes to empowering women.
Working with Catherine Worrall and Marga Lopez from Ideastream Design, the Minerva Foundation created a new logo and colour palette. Instead of simply slapping the new logo on the old website, Ideastream Design approached me and inquired about converting their existing site into WordPress. The old website consisted of a huge amounts of documents, static html files (with Ack! tables) and images, making it quite challenging to update. Converting the site to WordPress, simply made much more sense. Using a few plugins, like the Next Gen Gallery, the Foundation can now create as many photo galleries as they want and the rest of the website is a breeze to update. The new website is inviting, easy to navigate and will hopefully help the Foundation with their future endeavors.
Stop climate change by optimizing your website
Climate change has no regional boundaries and threatens more than the environment. If we continue on this path, famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees are the likely outcome. Given the urgency of the issue and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year, it’s only natural that this years’ topic for Blog Action Day, is climate change.
All throughout the day, you’ll no doubt be reading on the many actions you can take to help stop climate change. But did you know that if you are using WordPress, you could be making minor adjustments that also help? Making your website “green” is as easy as reducing the number of of calls to your database. Let me show you how.
Is WordCamp the conference for you?
I had the pleasure of attending my first WordCamp conference this weekend in Portland. Yes, I know, first WordCamp, how is that possible for a WordPress focused web developer like you? I guess I just wasn’t organized enough to attend previous ones.
I was also not expecting much. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, so how good can a $20 conference be? WordCamp PDX proved to be exceptional and went beyond my expectations.
Incorporate Cufón in WordPress
Every once in a while comes a project where using a font other than verdana, arial, trebuchet or tahoma would be nice. I recently finished a website for Tod Maffin where, Rob, the designer chose Sansa Condensed as the font of choice for headings. I could have created images for all of the page headings, but I wanted to give Tod the ability to update them if he chose to and more importantly, I also wanted to use the same font for the headings of blog posts. After reading about the alternatives, I decided to give cufón a try and was quite surprised to discover how easy it is.
Here are the steps required to integrate cufón in your wordPress site:
Step 1 – Get cufón
Visit the cufón website and download the YUI-compressed version of cufón. Save this js file in a js folder in your wordPress theme.
Step 2 – Generate your font file
Follow the steps on the Cufón website and add the generated js file to your js folder in your wordPress theme. You’ll be required to upload your font files and thus you need to have purchased them as well as verified that your fonts are legal to use in font embedding. Upload your js folder in your wordPress theme via FTP.
Step 3 – Add the code to your wordPress template
To use cufón, simply add the following lines of code to your header.php file.
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/js/cufon-yui.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/js/your_cufon_generated_font_file.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
Cufon.replace('h1');
Cufon.replace('h2');
</script>
These few lines of code will convert all of your h1 and h2 into my selected font. That’s it.