While working on my current blog theme I got so caught up with doing all the larger design aspects that I forgot about adding a favicon to my new theme. So often this little site element gets forgotten when it shouldn’t. It’s presence is important to help brand a site and make it recognizable when viewing lists of sites in bookmarks. So in honor of our little friend that is oft neglected, here’s a good resource for all things favicons. Finish Reading »

I love posts that follow the author’s design process for things like logos, illustrations and website designs. I decided to do one describing my process for building my current WordPress theme called Monsta. This post will give an overview of each step I took in the process, with pictures, while trying not to go too in depth on any one section. Some larger topics, such as the character illustration process or some of my custom WordPress stuff, will eventually get their own posts. Here's the design to development process of the Monsta WordPress Theme:

• Brainstorm
• Sketching
• Wireframe/Design
• HTML
• Character Design
• WordPress

Finish Reading »

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer the last few days for an upcoming post and I wanted to give a quick write-up about it.

What is Windows Live Writer?

Live Writer is a free desktop blog editor. It can write and publish posts without having to log into WordPress admin. Finish Reading »

The Monsta WordPress theme was designed to suit my personal creativity needs for a site. I needed something that mainly focused on my blogging efforts, but also wanted a place that could conveniently grow towards some of my other goals or creative outlets.

At the time I was designing the theme, I didn't have many items to put in my portfolio. I needed a design that still gave attention to my portfolio without dominating the design. This solution will let me add projects to my portfolio while creating an easy way for users to view the projects within it should I start having too many projects. I also have started to learn how to be an illustrator and character designer, so I wanted to have a place where I could give some attention to that as well. As I draw more characters, I plan to have the homepage character at the top replaced with them. My original skill set in computers was in the development realm, so I wanted to included some fancier jQuery to flex that side of my talents. The sidebar was made to meet that need. I also do a bit of photography, so the flickr integration was added with future plans to display some more photography in a more prominent manner. Finally, I wanted a theme that could change styles with posts similar to how Jason Santa Maria does. This way I can keep my design skills fresh and I also believe this is a fantastic way to keep readers coming back to view posts on the site itself. Overall I believe that this theme is perfect to suit my every changing needs and desires. If I start to spend more of my energies into character illustrations, I have a nice place to display some. If I care more about my photography, the site can reflect that easily. If I have some new css things I'd like to try I can do a one-off post to display them. Basically this theme is tailored to fit my spastic creativity outlets, so that I don't have to redesign and develop a new theme when I become interested in something else. Hope you enjoy it ;)

While just typing in urls for whatever reason one afternoon, I saw that wiiifit.com was available. I quickly purchased it simply because I knew that if I didn't someone else would do so soon with the upcoming video game from Nintendo called Wii Fit nearing its release date. After owning it for a bit, I decided to do some SEO and passive income tests for myself. I wanted to get some first hand experience with working with SEO, Google Adsense and Amazon Associates. My goal was to try to find a sweet spot between putting time into developing the site and getting a decent amount of money in return from minimal effort. I decided to do semi-weekly posts discussing the techniques I used to establish the blog and earn money from it. Each post shows updated analytics, adsense and Google keyword rankings with steps I planned to take to help maximize the site’s potential. After I got the site established I wanted to be able to earn a steady income with little to no effort required to maintain it. Although I do believe the site accomplished this goal, if you read some of the later posts you’ll see how much more profitable the site could have been if I could have gotten more incoming links to it to help boost it’s page rank.

• Client: Me
• URL: www.wiiifit.com

Posts in the Wiii Fit Story:

• A Wiii Fit Story: Introduction – SEO, Adsense and General Experimentation
• A Wiii Fit Story: Chapter 1 – Keyword Analysis and Beginning SEO
• A Wiii Fit Story: Chapter 2 – When Google Stood Me Up
• A Wiii Fit Story: Chapter 3 – SEO Baby Steps
• A Wiii Fit Story: Chapter 4 – Moving Up in Rank
• A Wiii Fit Story:Chapter 5 – The Final Chapter
• A Wiii Fit Story:2008 Year-end Totals

The Circularize’d WordPress Theme is a fun and happy theme designed to help brighten up the saddest of blogs. It features some bright colors with some nice admin options to let the user customize things like theme color, advertising and site logo without having to mess with any code. Circularize'd was my first foray at making a WordPress theme to be sold from a theme marketplace. Although the theme was rejected by the marketplace I submitted it to, it has a very nice framework whereby I should be able to make multiple designs from without much trouble at all.

• Client: Me, but designed for resell so I guess really the world.
• URL: http://demo.jeremyadamdavis.com/wordpress/circularized/