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

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I've been encouraged to bring back some more of the personal project style posts to this blog so in honor of doing so I'd like to give you a 2008 wrap up of how my wiiifit.com site did. If you haven't been keeping up with my Wiii Fit project, read the previous project posts. Finish Reading »

"I think all great innovations are built on rejections.”
Louise Nevelson

Over the past two weeks I've spent several hours of preparing, coding, testing and documenting a WordPress theme that I submitted to the web templates marketplace Theme Forest. I spent most of last night doing all the prep work for submitting the theme and its required documentation. Around 2am I finally got the theme submitted. And by the time I got back from lunch the same day, it was rejected.

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This post in the sixth in a series where I am recording the SEO efforts of my site wiiifit.com. If you’ve missed the previous posts, you should view these first. So apparently I lied about updating this series every 2 weeks. Every two months would have been more accurate. There isn't anything else I want to add to the site and so bi-weekly content updates are about all that is different. Plus the earnings are nothing impressive so I didn't want to keep posting each week how I make 5 cents and bore you. Finish Reading »

I'm trying to force myself to do some Photoshop tutorials so that I can get better at my graphic design skills. This grass effects Photoshop tutorial popped up the other day and I absolutely love the results so I decided to do my own version. The text needed to be something earthy or organic and the only thing that popped to mind was an organic pest control service a local exterminating company was promoting. All-in-all it wasn't as hard as it might seem. I have to give a big thanks to Collis for making a tutorial that is awesome and easy to replicate.

This post in the fifth in a series where I am recording the SEO efforts of my site wiiifit.com. If you’ve missed the previous posts, you should view these first. I will only be doing these posts every two weeks from now on because there isn't much more that I plan to add so the only updates will be on the analytics and earnings type of stuff. I did most everything I said I would do at the end of last post. Added <strong> to the pictures page and made a video page that has some youtube clips of demonstrations and game footage. While the number of visitors remained around a consistent 15-20 a day my SEO rankings are really starting to improve. Finish Reading »

This post in the fourth in a series where I am recording the SEO efforts of my site wiiifit.com. If you’ve missed the previous posts, you should view these first. Here we are again so lets get to it. Google finally came this week, and it actually paid a visit twice. So Google appears to recognized that the site is updated frequently. Yeah for me. I added a robots.txt. It is the most basic one that just lets any robots in and disallows none. I doubt it affects the SEO in any way, but I just felt like it needed to be added. Only a few more posts went up because most of the Wii Fit news related to it's success in the UK this week, which really wasn't anything I wanted to write about and most was the same info. Here is how the site fared for the week. Finish Reading »

This post in the third in a series where I am recording the SEO efforts of my site wiiifit.com. If you've missed the previous posts, you should view these first. So another week has gone by, but unfortunately not many results to show for it. I did everything I mentioned I was going to do in Chapter 2, but googlebot didn't come by and index any of the new changes so unfortunately there wasn't much improvement. I noticed that Google Webmaster tools told me there was an error with one of the pages in my sitemap. I deleted the sitemap and generated another one, so hopefully there won't be any more problems. I'm not sure if googlebot decided not to visit because there was an error in the sitemap or because it had more important people to attend to. The only improvements in the SERP is most likely from this blog being indexed and giving some link juice back to the Wiii Fit site. Here are the weekly results. Finish Reading »

This post in the second in a series where I am recording my SEO efforts of my site wiiifit.com

Ok, I'm ready to get down to business.

If you haven't already be sure to read the Introduction post to see what my plans are and what tools I will be using to manage my SEO efforts.

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About 8 months ago I purchased the domain www.wiiifit.com (3 i's). I didn't have any real goals for it. I bought it just because I knew someone was going to do it so why not me. If you aren't sure what Wii Fit is, it's supposed to be the next big Nintendo Wii video game involving fitness and exercise games. More info can be found on my Wii Fit News site or on the official Wii Fit site. Anyways, I decided to actually do something with the domain last week. I thought it would be a good test site to play with SEO and see if I can get some decent traffic (read: Adsense Earnings) to the domain. So once a week I will discuss any changes to the site and show the earnings and traffic reports. Here's the basic setup. Finish Reading »