First, avoid doing a domain transfer when you’re very close to your renewal date. Give yourself lots of time, just in case something goes awry. A month is great – two weeks should be doable. A week is really cutting it close.

Be sure the domain is unlocked before starting the process, or your transfer will be denied. Domains are usually kept locked to prevent unauthorized transfers, so when you’re ready to initiate a transfer make sure to go into your domain control panel and unlock it.

Make sure the contact email in your current account is up-to-date. Much of the transfer process relies on email notifications at every step, and if you’re not getting notifications at the right address, it throws a huge wrench into the works. On the flip side, some registrars will deny a transfer if you’ve changed any registrant details within a few months of renewal, so be sure to look through your registrar’s transfer FAQ before changing any contact information.

For most types of domains, you will need a special code from your current registrar. Because nothing is simple in the world of domain transfers, the code goes by many different names: EPP, authorization code, AuthInfo code, transfer key, transfer secret, and so on. Not only that, but simply locating it may not be obvious! You may have to look around for a while to find it – and take note that some registrars provide it directly in your control panel, while others will only email it to you. Again, if you get stuck, your registrar’s transfer FAQ may provide clues.

Keep an eye on your email after you’ve submitted the transfer request and when you get an email from your new registrar, be sure to choose the option to accept the transfer. You should also get an email from your old registrar and/or see a note in your control panel that a transfer is pending, at which point you can manually approve the transfer by logging into your control panel and clicking in the right place. If you don’t complete both these steps, your transfer will be either delayed by several days or blocked entirely.

Make a note of any services you may be using from your current registrar, such as domain parking, forwarding, email, custom DNS, or others. You will need to ensure that your new registrar offers the same services, and then once the transfer goes through, set up the equivalent services again. Be aware that there may be a time lag between when a service stops at your old registrar and when you can re-start it at your new registrar.

I know it seems like a lot to remember. Once you’ve done this a few times, it does go faster, but it’s always a bit of a rigamarole. Good luck to all in your domain-transfer adventures!

For more great web design tips make sure you subscribe to Zoonini’s newsletter or browse through back issues.

1. Install WordPress and log on.
2. Navigate to my Post section and rename the Uncategorized category to something more sensible. More often than not, I change it to News. If I know what other categories will be needed, I insert them here as well.
3. If I have blog content from the client (99% of the time I don’t), I insert it here. If I don’t have any blog posts content, I like to install the WP Example Content plugin which generates 5 posts and pages. 
4. Unlike blog posts, most clients do provide page content. So at this stage I would create the various pages and set up my menu via the Appearance > Menus.
5. Next I’ll navigate to my settings and ensure that under the general setting,  the full site title and tagline are inserted and I’ll change the timezone to the clients’ timezone.
6. Under Settings >  Writing I make sure that the appropriate category is selected as the default post category.
7. Under Settings > Reading I change the front page display to a static page. I usually select Home for my home page and Blog for my post. Again for me, 99% of the time, my clients want a site with a front page and blog posts appearing as a sub page.
8. Next we have the comments which are under Settings > discussion I normally don’t change much in here except when clients do not want comments at all.
9. The Media section is next and again, I normally leave the default as is.
10. During the build of a site, I make sure to check the second radio button on the privacy settings and block search engines.
11. Finally the last step and probably the most important one is the permalinks. I usually select the second option. I’m no SEO Guru and really don’t think that one permalink over another is going to make That much difference. I used to opt for custom permalinks and set them to /%category%/%postname%/ but then I read Chris’s post and I stopped that.(I know he didn’t say to stop using /%category%/%postname%/ but still, if that custom permalink is better, wouldn’t WordPress have made it an option? Those folks are smart, so I prefer to go with one of their choices. :-D)
    Setting up the permalinks at the beginning of a project can also save you a lot of grief from your client. If you discover that their server doesn’t support mod_rewrite, then finding this out before the launch will give you plenty of time to find an alternative.

Once I have taken care of these 11 steps, then I start building the theme. I’ve seen many designers get caught out when launching a site realizing that they didn’t style the blockquotes or the list items. Ensuring that you have content, even dummy content, during the build will help you release a better theme for your client.

If you don’t know what I mean, take a look at this comic from the Oatmeal. This is obviously an exaggerated scenario, but sooner or later, as a designer, you will be in the same situation.

So what can we do to avoid this?
One of the best way is to educate ourselves and our clients. Paddy Donnelly & Jack Osborne have gathered a great list of resources just for you. Make sure to bookmark it and then simply send your client to one of their topic pages for a quick intro on the subject. Hopefully that will provide them with the wee nudge that was needed.

Now, I have no idea what other conversations he had on the subject, but I think that Morten was surprised by some of my statements. I’ve been incredibly privileged to have worked in this field for so long and NOT have come across any discrimination. I don’t attend too many conferences and I work from home, so I’m not constantly meeting new people, but whenever I do, I do feel like women are welcomed and treated as equals.

Conferences like An Event Apart and Web Directions always have great women speakers and have always made me feel welcome.

WordCamps are also very well attended by women, and again, I’ve never felt shamed or ridiculed for being a woman.

Perhaps I’m kidding myself, I’m a little bit slow or I’ve just been incredibly lucky, I don’t know…

In addition to having been in this field for a while, I also do yoga on a regular basis. One of the teachings of yoga is to put out in the universe what you want to receive. As a result, I try to be honest, helpful and humble as much as I can and so I think that the universe has introduced me to male developers who are also kind, generous and don’t care about my gender.

To them, I say thank you.

I still like the tactile feel of paper and so prefer my books the old fashion way, but the iPad has changed the way I read online blog posts and articles.

Instapaper makes this tasks wonderfully pleasing

Instapaper is an online tool, which once you’ve set up a Free account, allows you to save articles to read later. During the day, I’ll bookmark several of these using my Read Later bookmarklet and then in the evening will read them  on the iPad. Best of all, Instapaper, strips all of the design, clutter, advertising and displays the article in a large black font making it so much more enjoyable.

I enjoy reading articles this way so much, that I’ve also installed another bookmarklet called Read Now. This bookmarklet also strips all of the clutter and provides you with an easy to read article with large fonts but it displays it in front of you right away instead of saving the article in your account.

What does this mean for typography?

As a designer, you should be aware of the typography limitations on the web. Common browser fonts are still you’re best bet for body text, but much more leeway can be had now with headlines. The Google web fonts api and typekit offers loads of new fonts to play with. These are easy to use and have been tested thoroughly. Typekit’s blog is a great resource to see how others are using various typefaces.

Do keep in mind though, that you no longer have control of your audience. With just a simple click of a button, I can make all of your design disappear and make the fonts bigger. So before spending hundreds of hours researching the right font and debating with your client, do keep in mind that your hard work may not be appreciated.

What about mock-ups?

If you’re concerned about fonts in your mock-ups, Google’s web fonts api allows you to download the font with the added option of contributing a small amount to the font designer. Another great resource for finding web fonts for your mock-ups is at Font Squirrel. All of the fonts are safe to embed in websites.

Just as an aside, if you’re looking for image placeholders, take a look at placekitten. Who will say no to your design mock-ups now?

When making changes to a static site, you’re web developer modifies the code of each HTML page. Changes on a WordPress site are done by modifying the content which is stored in a database. The WordPress templates, coded using PHP, then pulls the content dynamically from the database and displays the webpage.

Thus when planning your WordPress, you’ll need to make sure that your hosting provider offers the following:

• PHP version 4.3 or greater
• MySQL version 5 or greater

Any server that runs PHP and MySQL will do, but an Apache server is the most robust and has the most features for running a WordPress site. Some hosting provider will tell you that Microsoft based servers are perfectly fine, but please don’t listen to them. The set up is quite difficult and no fun at all.

Having installed hundreds of WordPress sites, I am happy to recommend the following hosting providers.

• Bluehost
• Dreamhost
• Media Temple
• Retrix
• Blacksun
• Webnames

These hosting providers all have very good WordPress support and great customer service.

Once you’ve set up your hosting, you’ll need to provide your web developer with the following:

• Access to your hosting provider control panel - This is needed to set up the database
• FTP access – This is needed to install the files on your server

Setting up a WordPress site is a bit more complicated than a static one, but with WordPress’s popularity, more and more hosting providers and making the necessary changes to offer full WordPress support.

Just in time for Christmas, Rafi from Graphic Fuel, has released a FREE Photoshop template for a blog design. You can read more about his design concept and download the PSD here. Based of a 960 grid, this PSD has everything you need to build your next blog design and is very well organized.

One of my latest project consisted of converting a design provided by Mizu Creative into a WordPress site for Paul Sangha. The site included a photo gallery which required jQuery animation, a few different templates, random background images and flash on the home page. I’m very proud of this work, but more importantly, by the fact that it looks nothing like a WordPress site.

I’ve worked with many graphic designers in the past and when asked about constraints, my only suggestions is to keep the width of the canvas to 960px. This constraint is only there to ensure that the site will look good on most browsers, but even this is debatable and will depend on the target audience.

The Paul Sangha website is a great example which demonstrates that designers should not be constrained by the CMS.

I’ve been developing websites for over 5 years now and find it amazing how everyone now seems to want a CMS. Additionally with the use of WordPress, I no longer desire to create static websites. The issue that I have with CMS is that damn “copying and pasting” and I put 100% of the blame on Microsoft. Super bloggers and geeks aside, most people I know use Word to write their content and rely on it for formatting and spell checking. Unfortunately when it comes to incorporating it in WordPress, copying and pasting leads to strange formatting which ends up ruining the aesthetic of the site and adding extra code.

We’ve been working with Vertical Bridge, an HR consulting and Recruitment company for over 4 years now. In that period of time, I’ve seen this company grow, transform and prosper. As a result we built them a static website, then a website with an XML based career section and more recently we revamped the site and incorporated the entire site into WordPress. Our biggest reason to do the switch was to take advantage of RSS feeds for the career section. Since Vertical Bridge provides job opportunities in various industry sectors, providing RSS feeds for each of these seemed like a great added value. Additionally, jobs can be indexed by Google which was not the case with the XML based website.

Transforming the Vertical Bridge website into WordPress was easy enough. The templates were created based on the design provided by Ideastream Design, pages were created for the static section of the site and posts were used for the blog as well as for the careers. I would have been more than happy to simply use the standard posts for the job posts, but Tzaddi, always wanting to find a better solution, did some digging and came across Flutter by Freshout.

This plugin proved to be amazing. With just a few minor adjustments, we now have an admin feature which allows us to select the industry, specify the location, salary, status, job type and insert descriptions, requirements and additional comments.

I must admit that Tzaddi’s find did prove to be quite impressive. This plugin is simply superb. Except of course for the editing areas. Unlike for blog posts, the flutter plugin only provides a visual editor (click on thumbnail for larger picture) and so copying and pasting from Word leads to disastrous results. The only solution that I could find was to let my clients know that when working with Word, it would be best to transfer the content to notepad and then copy and paste from there. I’m not sure what other solution there is. The WordPress forum has resulted in no replies whatsoever and none of the additional plugins have solved this problem.

Anyone out there have any suggestions?

At first I was irked by the requirement to give a friend’s e-mail address in the form. But then I realized that’s the hook their model is hanging on. You probably have a friend who likes the same music as you, and since you’re recommending a freebie, and Backstage promises not to spam them, they’ll probably forgive you for sharing their address… Probably. There’s a bit of a leap of faith in that assumption. I think this requirement to share a friend’s address will affect their uptake on the offer somewhat but it also makes viral marketing more effective than it would be otherwise. So the net effect is probably a positive one for them.

What do you think?

Backstage Free Music Downloads