Often when building a website it's natural to put all of your focus on the website. We can spend hours thinking about what goals we want the website to accomplish, but not thinking about what we really want to get out of the experience. So before you get out your sketchpad and start making wireframes, think about what you personally want to achieve by building this website. Are you personally gaining some new skills to make you a better designer/developer/marketer? If the website is a complete failure, is there something you can look back on and say, "Well, at least I'm better at xyz" or, "I got to meet some cool people that might be able to help me later on." Here are the goals for latest website project and some general guidelines to help you make yours. This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is the third post explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy. Finish Reading »

With the new year’s upon us and resolutions being made, I have one big goal of launching my pet project website that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a few months. The first order of business to get the site going is to define my process for designing and developing it. I’ve gone over my design process for making this WordPress theme, but now I want define my process for building a site from scratch.

I’ve spend the last few weeks reading through several posts/e-books that attempt to define a proper website design process or expound on a certain step in the process. I believe that I’ve come up with a good process that can work well for individuals or for small groups building websites. I’ve also included a list of resources used to help me define my process in case you’d like to delve into the subject a bit more.

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 »