The font for the image replaced headings is Museo, a nice free font that’s quite popular at the moment, and if you have Helvetica on your computer then it works quite well with the body text. Not that there’s a lot of body text going. This is really just a place to put some photographic firsts apart from the jumble of constant shots posted over on Walk a Mile in my Shoes. Both sites have a different purpose.

Lightview was used on the galleries page to provide slideshows of the individual photo sets (never more than three) and I considered doing this on the home page with the four large thumbnails which have that affordance, but seriously the size of downloading the Prototype library for someone just visiting the home page made it prohibitively slow for low bandwidth users. As it is, that page is image heavy, as you’ll note there is a lot of body text in Museo as image (with the text in HTML but removed using a negative text-indent). The H2 headings in sidebars also use a negative text indent to do very simple image replacement, as is also the practise for H2 page titles.

Two interesting decisions, the first being there is no blog. Why? Because I spend far too much time blogging here and on Walk a Mile in my Shoes. However, a hand rolled RSS feed is available to notify potential customers of any new photo sets or free desktop wallpapers available on the website. The second decision was to not call a page Contact but instead call it Sales. Why? Because I don’t really want anyone to just contact me unless they’re interested in these photos or in something about photography. Similarly, you’ll only see a sidebar link to Walk a Mile in my Shoes on some pages and if you look very closely at the footer there’s a tiny text link to this weblog. Steven Clark Studio isn’t really about promoting either of my blogging pursuits.

Sales are primarily through my Etsy site at this point (Paypal only) or through direct contact with me. Why? Because the energy of providing a full e-commerce solution for the minimal (if any) sales this site would ever produce does not make commercial sense. But sales were never the reason for Steven Clark Studio, so don’t be distracted by that page too much.

Another point of interest might be overlooked, but it’s not there as a definitive statement pertaining to the photography. Below those home page pseudo thumbs (which take you to the galleries page) is a block of text that says the following:

Also available, on selective projects, are web design services which include consultation on business objectives, leveraging social tools, site design and construction, internet marketing, website usability and accessibility, and professional face to face advice. There is a world of difference between a web site and a web solution.Steven Clark Studio

This site is to sell my design and art photography skillset but with a commitment to the MBA (Master of Business Administration) over the next two years full time I’m not about to be hollering Hire Me on the corner. However, on selective projects, where I’m really interested it wouldn’t be a bad way to earn a little extra to supplement my postgraduate education.

So there’s Steven Clark Studio. It’s only small, isn’t highly exciting and it’s a simple grey on grey. No website is perfect and to be honest if 24ways.org gets hoorahs for their latest adventure then I’m keeping the grey on grey text here. If it’s hard to read pump up the volume and phone those guys. When you get a decent answer phone me and share the mud.

I hope you enjoy the photography and share the link. Thanks. Also, not fully debugged and tested as yet (as usual) so if you have a Mac issue or something worth telling then a polite email or comment would be excellent.

WordPress 2.7 is coming out and it’s smoking hot by all accounts with some sweet under the hood changes, a new Dashboard, and a brand new administration interface that will make it more usable. Did they say more usable? What area of usability research has ever said changing a content management administration area’s interface several times in a year will equal greater usability? Most users I deal with struggle with their email applications – small to medium businesses and smaller Not for Profit organisations.

In fact, as someone who has to deal with client education I’m going to have to field a number of business related client calls that are going to ask me WTF happened to the buttons? Where the hell did that feature move to? Is this the same program? What have I done to them while they were asleep? To many of them there will be an attribution of fault laid on my professional doorstep.

There are a number of problems that can be identified here:

• WordPress is getting feature creep – I’d like a pool if you could add that? And a horse?
• WordPress has mixed up usability and change – one makes my life easier and the second Makes Me Think! Makes My Clients Think! The usability for existing non-technical users might not be so hot.
• WordPress is listening to a developer an academic community not all of whom are delivering their product commercially to clients.
• WordPress have forgotten most clients aren’t developers – most clients struggle at the email level. Most clients are definately not us.

In a bright new world where everyone is a technical expert I’d have to smile and say I welcome the redesigned redesign of the WordPress administration section. But I don’t, especially in the name of usability. It is never good for software to keep moving things dramatically around. The trick is to improve features and improve code without impacting the user at all. True, the new interfaces may aid usability for someone opening it for the first time in 2009, although it has only been claimed not proven although testing at Ball State University’s Center for Media Design appears to say I am wrong on that score. But, in my opinion, for the real world – usability will negatively be impacted because of the change.

From a business perspective I now have to ask myself whether I need to change my preferred platform for small to medium business because WordPress doesn’t offer my non-tech-savvy client base the stability. Training manuals need to be rewritten from the ground up, as well.

I can only say that usability is a little more complicated than listening to ten thousand people with a wishlist in your developer forums and making a pretty design with some fancy new spangled widgets in the wild might not necessarily match the testing results that have been conducted at Ball State. So, please, tell me that the WordPress 2.7 administration interface redesigned redesign is prettier and more efficient. But don’t tell me it’s more usable. Usable to who? And when?

This should have been discussed, thought out and executed when they were dealing with Happy Cog on the last iteration. Seriously, altered interfaces are going to impact the end users. These end users are mom and pop everybody, not the developer community. The developer community will keep asking you for everything. Everything! Users will only ask you for consistency and understandability so they can change content.

Any time you significantly change the user experience you are going to put cognitive barriers in front of your real world users (not developers, users). But yes, the new interfaces are very pretty. Unfortunately they will cost me commercial hours explaining, retraining and redocumenting them for my existing clients (again).

OK all the WordPress fanboys can unblock their ears and blow their snotty handkerchiefs that not everyone is elated. There, don’t you feel better? Now say it after me – usability improvement my arse! Please show me the metrics of that study for existing users.

<?php if ((!is_page())) { ?>
<body id="News">
<?php } elseif ((is_page('Home')) || (is_page('Studio')) || (is_page('Support')) || (is_page('About')) || (is_page('Contact')))
{ ?>
<body id="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<?php } else { ?>
<body>
<?php } ?>

This is a handy base for doing something useful so I thought a simple continued snippet or two might open your mind to the possibilities. For example, you might like to highlight the current page in your navigation. Even better, you could highlight the current page but keep the News (blog) link highlighted while users are on all the blog related pages such as search, archive etcetera. Sounds logical and it’s easy enough to achieve (This example comes from the Hunter Island Press theme).

We’ll start by putting a few more IDs into the links on the horizontal navigation bar. In this case the navigation is made up of a simple unordered list of links. Note that the ID is placed directly on the unordered list and not on a containing div. You don’t need to put a block level element into a div container, it’s better to just work directly with the list.

<ul id="navbar">
    <li><a id="homelink" href="#">Home</a></li>
    <li><a id="studiolink" href="#">Studio</a></li>
    <li><a id="supportlink" href="#">Support</a></l>
    <li><a id="aboutlink" href="#">About</a></li>
    <li><a id="newslink" href="#">News</a></li>
    <li><a id="contactlink" href="#">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

The next task is to style the horizontal navigation bar without the current page tab highlighted. When you get this working you can worry about the current tab later.

ul#navbar {
position: static;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
width: 100%;
display: block;
list-style-type: none;
background-color: #000;}ul#navbar li { display: inline; }

ul#navbar li { display: inline; }

ul#navbar li a {
margin: 0;
padding: 9px 0;
width: 16.6%;
min-width: 70px;
height: 40px;
float: left;
border-bottom: 4px solid #000;
font-size: .9em;
font-family: helvetica, verdana, arial, sans-serif;
color: #fff;
text-align: center;
text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;
background: #000; }
ul#navbar li a:hover {
border-bottom: 4px solid #8F0000;
background: #222; }

As a snippet goes you can take or leave a lot of what is in there (including the min-width that applies to the fluid layout of Hunter Island Press). But all that’s left for us to achieve is the highlighting of the current tab – specifically so that users entering the news get a consistent tab for the section. We achieve this by associating the body ID with the link ID in the navigation bar. If any of the following selectors are present the background and bottom border will be changed to appear as the current tab.

body#Home li a#homelink,
body#Studio li a#studiolink,
body#Support li a#supportlink,
body#About li a#aboutlink,
body#News li a#newslink,
body#Contact li a#contactlink {
background: #222;
border-bottom: 4px solid #8f0000; }

Hopefully you can take something about using WordPress away from this tutorial and extend the concept of the dynamic body ID further. Enjoy.

<?php if ((!is_page())) { ?> 
    <body id="News">
<?php } elseif ((is_page('Home')) || (is_page('Studio')) || (is_page('Support')) || (is_page('About')) || (is_page('Contact')))
    { ?> 
    <body id="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<?php } else { ?>
    <body>
<?php } ?>

What this snippet does in English is it says – if this isn’t a page (which would mean its a part of the news section – blog, archive, single, search) then the body id will always be News. This allows for me to keep the News tab highlighted in the horizontal navigation bar. Else if the page is Home, Studio, Support, About or Contact (which are other members of the horizontal navigation bar) then the body id will use the page title and that tab remains highlighted on the navigation bar. Otherwise if its any of the other pages (like the ones in the content rich footer) just use a plain old body element.

One thing about using PHP in your WordPress templates is the power of skinning a cat whichever way you need to on the day. Simply understanding the available WordPress Conditionals puts some gusto into your possiblities. What was the last way you skun that dynamic body id in WordPress?

This page of my site is the blogging section – or you might call it the current news on your site. But I also wanted to have the same funtionality on separate pages of the same site, particularly with photography and drawing. How cool would it be to have each of these three pages run as an actual blog? Way cool… then I realised it was really simple.

First I have to admit I have a WAY lot of space on my server account at Tashosting thanks to Brett Drinkwater’s generosity. Second I should confess to having way too much time on my hands some mornings. Third you’ll need permission in your account to have another 2 databases running. So the solution was quick and easy.

1. Installed two more WordPresses into their own folders in the root directory – one for photography and one for drawing
2. Got my original theme for this site and made a copy (new version) for the two new WordPress installations
3. In this new copy theme I stripped all the extra folders – gone are the extra stylesheets, graphics folders, and javascript etcetera from the original theme so all that remains is the style.css file and other php templates of the theme
4. Remove all extra functionality you don’t require on the new theme’s index.php - I removed the search function and pages navigation links
5. If you have a content rich footer with stuff in it like mine then think about culling it like I have but you may want to dig deeper to suit your own needs
6. Upload and install the new themes folders to their respective new locations and activate them in the Presentation tab of WordPress admin

Remember, you don’t want these new themes showing their own pages or other functionality – just one page would suffice. Also, for consistency, I cut and pasted my horizontal navigation bar into the new themes.

The good part about all that is the respective themes in your subdirectories (photography and drawing) are going to automatically use the main theme’s stylesheets etcetera. If you have any trouble its simple enough to wire it up so it all works fine but I’d expect it all to work straight out of the box without your intervention.

Why would you want to do this in the real world? Well say you’re designing for a small business which wants to post latest news articles (the main blog) but also wants the ability to put the latest deals or specials on other product pages. By using multiple installations on the same site you can very quickly generate a situation where the necessary pages come automatically with their own area specific search functionality and syndication feeds.

Anyway I guess as long as you have the room and a supportive host who doesn’t charge you by the database then its always a quick and easy option if you’re asked by a client.

They published an article this week titled Premium WordPress Themes: Are They Here To Stay? Good question. So what are premium themes? They come with a price tag and may provide extra functionality within a customized design. Free themes tend to be customised around blogging, while premium themes provide for magazines, design folios or other business models.

But are they great? I’m assuming in this article you’re not a developer and don’t have developers in-house – otherwise you’d be getting an original design for your business. Here’s my take on why I don’t really see the point beyond a certain level of poverty-struck business or hobbyist for premium themes. And why premium themes aren’t the budget cure-all they might come across as being on first sight.

• You don’t own the brand – a magazine or folio without branding is like a generic cereal box in a supermarket
• You have no business guarantee that the design will be supported long term by the developer
• You don’t know the developer and may find yourself in troubled waters
• You don’t really know what you’re getting for your money

That’s just my take on some basic issues with using premium themes for your business. Let me expand on those points a little…

Bad for Branding

You don’t own the brand. By that I mean that the design is a generic one and even if only four or five magazines or folios look exactly the same then a lot of your branding power is lost. For example, if it were a design folio and someone ran across the same design folio (in appearance and structure) then what would they think? First they could think – from a site user perspective – they are on the same site. Or that you stole the design and are shonky. Or that you’re such a crap designer you needed to buy a relatively cheap knock-off to mask your limited abilities. As time goes on your premium design becomes more and more common.

No Business Guarantees

You have no business guarantee of ongoing support. This refers to the issue of future upgrade paths for WordPress as much as it does to the reality this developer may take his ball and go home any day. What if something doesn’t work as expected? What if you need support and don’t get it? What if a newer version comes out and after the upgrade your premium theme no longer works? The ideal picture that every developer is both technically flawless and a pristine ethical business person is not the reality of the web. At some point you may find yourself out in the cold. Do you have a Plan B?

Don’t Know the Developer

You don’t know the developer. This carries over from the previous point I made. Are you paying for a pirate version of the theme? Or will there be an officially sanctioned single place on the web to sell them? I think a single shop would be impractical so you have to consider that integrity aspect before paying your money. What details are you giving this person on the web – bank account numbers, personal details, etc? Is it safe to do business with individuals like this? Will you get sued someday by a third party who paid for these templates as customised (from a legitimate developer) but then found they were ripped and onsold to you as premium templates? If that happens what will you do?

What are you Really Getting?

You don’t really know what you’re getting. Again I stress that if you’re buying themes then you probably aren’t a developer yourself, right? So how do you know the design is usable or accessible? How do you know that theme is what you imagine it should achieve for you? My understanding of premium theme sales would be a scenario where the client views the theme online and pays by credit card for a download. Right? Or are you both technically expert yourself and have the freedom to troll and test all the code before you pay your money? I kind of doubt that freedom would be happening. So you don’t really know what you’re getting, to some extent, before you download. A view source might not be enough. Also, you might not get exactly what you saw in the demo (refer back to ethical businessmen).

Conclusion

While you might say all of that is the same with any web design process you have to remember this is a case of seeing a few screenshots online, paying some cash and downloading a theme. A lot of things could go wrong with that mixed bag of tricks. You aren’t getting an original design but are sharing the design with untold other people. For all you know you may have the same portfolio design as several porn sites and a conman from Lithuania. If that isn’t enough to put you off then consider if this would be a good idea if you were buying a plasma television – see picture, send money, yada yada. Yeh ebay right? And now don’t you see the potential for fraud in that business model?

If you have the time and the money to go another way I’d suggest its worth thinking about the real deal. Hire a designer and some developers to pull it all together. Hire from word of mouth not over the Internet. Do some risk analysis on the project. What are your business goals and objectives? Don’t go for budget because in the end free and cheap don’t always end up as good as they sound. Not really.

In the end you need a web solution that is designed for your web problem. The expense should be justified by the return on investment. Seriously. Why do you want a website again?

To that end I suggest you may find use for the following code snippet which allows you to call the content of any authored page on your WordPress site into a sup-part of another page – perhaps index.php could do with some static content.

<?php global $wpdb;
$pages = $wpdb->get_results ("SELECT post_content FROM " . $wpdb->posts . " WHERE ID = 15");
foreach ($pages as $page)
{
echo $page->post_content;
} ?>

So why would you do this? Well I’ve found great use with clients who I only want to allow editing of a certain section of a page. For example, a portion where they offer a weekly special. I don’t want them playing in the code (no way) and I don’t want them going to a full page with other information they might inadvertently junk up on me. So I’ll jump into the template and call this snippet where the ID equals the page that contains the content your client can edit. Its that simple really. The client is given the name of that specific page (in this case it is called specials) and they just open that one page when they need to update specials on their site.

You should note that creating your new page will add it into your pages navigation list called by the wp-list-pages() function. You’ll probably want to exclude it with a parameter of &exclude=15 where the number is that of your specials page.

[sorry this presentation has been removed]

The idea of this presentation is to simply walk the students through the process of finding where their localhost version of WordPress is and to understand the basic file structure within its installation folder. It doesn’t walk through a solid tutorial on the WordPress admin interface as I can do that pretty well in person. This, however, introduces themes and the theme folder and has a couple of very basic tips on the need to understand the loop, a couple of crucial templates – index.php, header.php and sidebar.php. If you’re new to WordPress then good luck and I hope this resource helps you along the path.

I may leave this up for a while or not depending on how much its grabbed and the bandwidth but if you find it useful then feel free to use it (without renaming it as your own of course). Information sharing is the key to a healthy vibrant industry.

As a student I’m completing my Java 2 Micro Edition multiplayer game using the high level interface (so its nothing major to look at) and datagrams for communication plus a tome of documentation about design justification, how the code works and the ever inspiring testing regime. Seriously, if you develop multiplayer applications in mobile emulators for a living you are my true god and inspiration of patience! If you don’t give it a try – seriously its slow. Also I have to produce a 6000 word project report for my corporate internship which accounts for 35% of my academic mark for the internship (so its rather important) and provide my sponsor organisation with their polished research report at a small presentation next week. My research was into the cost benefit to government of providing subsidised jobs for the long term unemployed and disadvantaged job seekers.

As a teacher I’m installing WordPress on Localhost for my students and they make the step into more sophisticated development using templates. To me this will be an exciting move as they’ve spent the last two weeks discussing usability and user centred design, accessibility in the context of the large public service website, and touching on the basic methodologies of research and documentation when scoping the problem space (competition sites, internal policies, etc) while working on mockups for a large information driven site with a broad user base.

The simplest version of how to install WordPress on your local machine for our purposes has to be the short and sharp version at the WordPress Blog Customisation site (not sure if its affiliated with the software or a private support site). While it apparently has some Extensible Markup Language (XML) issues this version is simple and fast to achieve – seeing as I’m the Santa doing all that geekery while the class sleeps in the morning – and it offers the ability to effectively edit their templates without having to traverse the whole File Transfer Protocol (FTP) scene during development.

So that’s why I’ve been a bit quieter this week. My brain actually feels like its tingling inside my head from over activation or something and I’m looking forward to a beer in about 10 days just to enjoy a weekend for a change with the family.