Blog

I didn’t really do much with my personal blog. I pretty much had things the way I wanted them with my previous design. So I basically just made some minor refinements and tidied up some things I had tacked on since my last redesign.

It’s now quicker and easier to find older content that may be of interest, via the tabbed box that sits in the top of the sidebar. It gives you quick access to related posts, the most recent posts, the most recent reviews, and the most popular posts.

Reviews have received the most love. Specifically, the review archive. The “wall of games” is sorted by date descending. But you can now filter them by platform.

On the topic of game reviews, I commissioned a fellow by the name of Jeff Jenkins to whip up some comic style character illustrations to coincide with my review scores. The idea was inspired by GiantBomb, but I wanted to do full body illustrations as opposed to waist up. Jeff exceeded my expectations and produced some brilliant work that can be seen at the bottom of every game review. You will be seeing more of Jeff’s work on this here website in the coming weeks.

Portfolio

I’m extremely happy to finally have a condensed portfolio that is flexible and allows me to share a bit more in the way of details for each project. At this time, I only have the services I provided, but I plan on writing a little descriptive paragraph for each down the road.

Marketplace

Having recently jumped on the digital goods train, I’m quite fond of having cash rolling in constantly from sales. I wanted to build a platform of my own that allowed me to sell digital goods of various shapes and sizes. ThemeForest has worked out really well for selling WordPress themes, and I intend to keep future theme releases on that platform. But I have plans to release add-on (expansion) packs for my existing themes, and ThemeForest doesn’t support that sort of thing. Through my own site, customers will be able to pick up things like additional colour schemes, added functionality, etc. at a reasonable cost.

Additionally, I have partnered with some other designers and developers who will be selling all sorts of good stuff through my Marketplace in the coming months.

I have also opened the floodgates for theme customization. Anyone who has purchased one of my themes has the option of having it customized to their liking for a small fee.

Workshop

I have one more new addition that is still in the works which will be surfacing shortly. I’m calling it my Workshop, and it’s a place to get your hands on tools and tutorials on the topics of general web design and WordPress development. Much of this content will be free, but I am planning on doing some extensive screencasts which will mostly be premium (fancy word for paid) content.

The Kinks

Call me irresponsible, but I haven’t even looked at this new site in any version of Internet Explorer just yet. Quite frankly, I just don’t have it in me at the moment. After spending 5 solid weeks working on this site, the last thing I feel like doing is troubleshooting IE bugs. In time, I’ll make sure things are in order for IE8 and IE7, but IE6 can go to hell!

Moving Forward

This redesign is still very much a work in progress. These past few weeks have been spent setting the stage for great things to come in the weeks and months to follow. I’m super excited to see how things pan out, and I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone for their continued support over the years. It’s truly amazing to have some many people that I don’t even know buying my products, hiring me to redesign their website, or shouting words of encouragement via Twitter. Thank you!

Coming Up With Something Different

Since I had been sporting the same layout and design for so long, I wanted to really switch things up and go drastically different. At the same time, I wanted to maintain the image that people have come to know me for. My initial goals were…

• Anything but black. Preferably dark text on light background. Stick with pink as main accent colour.
• No visual horizontal division. Attempt vertical division.
• Come up with new section heading/sub-heading treatment and/or placement.

I managed to come up with a pretty unique layout with my first wireframe. The idea with the ideas, was that they would be mini-tabs along the left margin. Clicking them would push the entire site to the right, revealing a tray that contains all of the headings and descriptive text. While I thought this was a great concept and would raise some eyebrows, I knew it would be a nightmare for older and lower spec machines. Not to mention, some people might not even notice them and wonder what all of the content actually was. In short, hiding the headings by default wasn’t the greatest idea.

My second wireframe corrected this potential issue by dumping the headings in a gutter off to the right. Having them as part of the main container meant I had less space for content, so some rearranging took place.

Doing Away With Black

I assume 2 things come to mind when people think of my old design – grunge and black. All along, my intentions were to stick with the grunge theme, but I definitely wanted to move away from dark colours primarily. I started working with beige and light browns, and after much tinkering with adjustment layers, settled on a colour scheme.

For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out what to do with the header and footer. I wanted to have the headings separated from the content area visually, but that gutter would be made wider for the article layout where it would be re-purposed as the sidebar. I had tried stretching the header and footer from edge-to-edge, but didn’t like the “T” shape it produced. After much fiddling, I decided to restrict the entire site in a container.

Back to Freelance

You may have noticed that there was no place for my design work on the homepage in the previous mocks. Up until March of this year, I had been working for a design studio and wasn’t able for hire. When I made my return to the freelance world, I revisited the homepage and put in a prominent space to promote my work.

It wasn’t long before I overhauled the design section to make it even more prominent. At the same time, I came up with the idea of separating blog and design related items in the main navigation. With the exception of the header, I was really happy with how things had come together and considered the homepage complete.

So Much For Change

Over the past year or so, I’ve taken a liking to brown. I own some brown clothes, and Deanna picked up this great set of luggage that’s brown with white and pink lining. I absolutely loved that combination and decided to give it a go. I posted a side-by-side comparison on Flickr to get some perspective from my peers in the field, and see which people were favouring. Some great points were raised and I decided to go with the brown.

Last Minute Decisions

One thing I was never crazy about was the length of the homepage. As much as I liked giving my readers a place on the homepage (recent comments), it was something I could do without. At the same time, I came up with idea of the thought bubble for my latest Twitter update, so that was one less thing adding length to the page. As I mentioned before, I wasn’t stoked on the header – primarily the nav and the “logo”. So I took another stab at it and came up with something much better.

The last thing to change before I started building the site out was the primary colours for each section. I had kept the colours from my previous design, but they were just too stark against the brown.

And that’s it. The final mock was locked down and I moved onto the XHTML/CSS phase.

What Took So Long?

When I first decided that it was time to retire the old, trusty design, I was working on it in my spare time at a casual rate. Obviously, there’s no hard deadline when I’m working on my own stuff, and since I was doing the bulk of the work in my spare time, progress was slow at best. Right when I started making good headway, Addison joined our world and my redesign took a backseat. From that point, my spare time has dwindled and I found myself preferring to sit on the couch with my feet up rather than return to my desk to work when I had some time to myself. But about a month ago, I lit a fire under my own ass and promised myself I would get it done by mid-September. Here we are, about 3 weeks shy of my self imposed deadline, and while the site isn’t everything I had planned it to be, the bulk of the work is done.

Phases

If you were to take a look at my brainstorming notes, you would see a lot of things that didn’t make it, in what I’m calling Phase 1. I came to the realization that if I were to pack everything that I had planned for my redesign into a single release, it would be months before it would be completed. So instead I’ve opted for phases. Phase 1 being the blog overhaul. Phase 2 will focus on the design section, which I have big plans for.

Tried and True

While I was mocking this new design, I focused first on the homepage. When it came time to mock the article layout, I hit a roadblock. I ended up with half a dozen wireframes, but nothing that really sat well, so I decided to stick with what works. As you’ll notice, the article layout is pretty much the same as my previous design, with extra bits of content sprinkled through-out.

Take a Look Around

I was going to list all of the new additions and major revisions, but I’ll leave them for you to find. So please, take a few minutes and click around. Be sure to drop a comment and let me know what you think.

Now, why would I want to do such a thing? First off – the whole “review” thing has really taken its toll on my gaming habits. I realized tonight I’ve played no more than 3 online games of Gears of War (excluding co-op) in the 3 months I’ve owned it. And sadly enough, that’s probably the most multiplayer action I’ve seen in recent months. For the most part, I feel that I have to whip through the single player campaign of games before I can review them and usually go a few rounds of online as well. But I rarely have the opportunity to get back to games once I’ve reviewed them. In short, it seems like I’m no longer playing games to have fun, but to gain experience so I can write about them. Which in all honesty, is kind of silly. It’s not like I’m being paid to write reviews. In fact, the reviews on my site are some of the lowest hit pages and have very few comments when compared to some of the other casual posts.

So my question to you – is what kind of game related content would you rather seem me churning out? Do you prefer the criteria and play-by-play as I go through my checklist for reviews. Or would you rather shoot the shit about the latest demo to hit the Xbox Live Marketplace?

I feel that reviews don’t really invoke conversation too much either, as it’s more just me putting my opinion out there. I actually prefer being at the same level (being a casual gamer) and receiving more feedback in the way of comments and seeing actual conversations develop.

But anyway, enough out of me. What do you think?

Lastly, just a note that I’ll be some what out of commission for a day or two at the beginning of this week. Having my wisdom teeth (all 4!) yanked and will be sleeping off the pain, or so I hope. So if you’re a new-comer, please be patient while your comment is in moderation. I’ll get to it ASAP.

There have always been things about my site that I wasn’t happy with. I’ve built it out so much over the past year and a lot of it felt (and looked) tacked on. Every time I open my stylesheet I cringe at the sight of some old habits I’ve since broke and always wanted to go back and rewrite it. But really, who’s gonna do that? Not this guy! I a lot of changes that brought my CSS up to a state that I can at least live with until I do a full redesign. I changed all my font units from percentage to em. I never really knew the full advantages of em over the other units until I read “Effective Style with em” over at MondayByNoon. A great read if you’re not fully in the know on that topic. I also removed pixel units from everything with a value of zero – another bad habit of mine. And lastly, I revised all my colours and shortened those that duplicate to 3 characters. It’s funny how long it’s taken me to change my ways. Every CSS or Web Standards book I’ve read has always shown the proper way of doing things, but I never bothered to change. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

I decided to bring back the coloured headings, which meant ditching the link colours and going back to a coloured underline for the various sections. In turn, I ended up going back to the “highlighting” effect that drew so much attention way back when. And speaking of colour, I’ve introduced a fourth into the mix. School bus yellow – yeah! Ugh, I’m so not a fan of yellow, to be honest. But it works, so I’ll keep it. I wanted to separate my work related stuff from personal on the site as I have in every other aspect of my life. So yellow it is for the Design section.

Lastly, I simplified the header quite a bit and tamed it down. I was never fully happy with it and I’m still not, but it’s an improvement. At least it doesn’t stand out as much as the previous one. I was always bothered by the alignment of the header on subpages as well. Originally, everything was peachy. Then I decided to stretch the sidebar out to 300px to fit some ads in there and it threw everything off. I’ve fixed this now, so all subpages line up now. While you’re looking in that direction, you may have noticed that my name is nowhere to be found. Yes, this is on purpose. I couldn’t settle on a typeface I really liked and I didn’t have time to work on a “logo”, so I pulled it off all together. I’m not sure I really need a logo for my myself, anyway. I might come back to this, but will most likely leave it as is until the next redesign.

I have lots more I will be doing over the next week or so. Finally ran out of hours today and I’m a little tired, to say the least. So i’ll get to them when I can. To those that preferred the black design over the white and pink, sorry it took so long to bring it back (in some form) – hope you like it! The white really wasn’t me anyway. I love black. I wear a black shirt every day (seriously), all the furniture in my home is black and I painted my damn Xbox 360 black. My website needs to be black.

Since July of 2005, I’ve been working from home. Up until recently, for other people. Some shit went down and I found myself in a situation where I needed to find a new source of income stat! After sending out a few emails and replying to some quote requests, I had a few weeks of work lined up in a matter of hours. I’ve decided to stick with it for a while and see if I can make a go in the world of full-time freelance web design.

When I last Rebooted I re-organized my homepage. Giving things that get updated more frequently better exposure. Since my priorities have shifted in the real world, I need my site to reflect that. I’ve moved the portfolio back up to the top half of the homepage which now spans the entire right column. There’s also three examples shown instead of just two.

I don’t seem to be spending nearly as much time reading news online these days and in return, I haven’t been updating Quick Bits as often as I once was. You can now find it in the bottom right corner of the homepage. While you’re down there, you might notice the album covers are back. For the past month I’ve been using a fancy Last.fm script that displays your top 10 artists of the week and lets you listen to some tracks from each. Pretty awesome, except for the fact that Last.fm has been plagued with shitty servers for as long as I can remember. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t take that into consideration when I made the decision to include the list – or maybe I did and figured it wouldn’t be that bad. In any case, it was causing my homepage to take up to a minute to load at times. At best, there was still a 10-15 second delay, which is not cool. Back to updating the covers by hand. And before you suggest it – I’ve tried out the Scrobbler plugin that pulls album covers. At any given time, there’s at least two or three albums in my top 10 that don’t have covers in the Last.fm database, so a shitty placeholder image was put in it’s place. And let’s not forget, I’d still be relying on their servers to get the data – scrap that all together. I might go back to using the WordPress links manager so I can have them appear in random order.

A couple weeks ago, I quietly rolled out a new “feature” that a couple people noticed and commented on. I actually had absolutely nothing to do with it. I mentioned that would love to have my comment form stay at the top of your browser window while you scroll the comments – mostly for my own use to make it easier to reply to comments, but I figured it would make things easier for everyone. Neo Geek, who’s no stranger to these parts, offered his services and in no time had it up and running. I’ve since worked with him on a couple freelance projects and I must say, the guy’s a bit of a genius. One of those dudes that can just make shit happen. He even built a WordPress plugin out of one of the requests I had for him. Wasn’t it nice of him to share?

Now, to address some more of those questions you might have for me…

• “What happened to Back in Black and when is it coming back (again)?”
  I currently have the two styles as separate themes. This was done for a couple reasons, both of which are irrelevant now. To carry over all the changes I just made to Pretty in Pink, I’d basically have to do all the work again for Back in Black. I simply don’t have time for that right now. I’m going to look into a better method of switching the stylesheet and hope to roll that out over the next couple weeks. I’ve already had someone suggest a method they created, so I’ll be checking in with them soon. I also needed to get the (mt) Media Temple logo in there by the 9rules badge as part of the partnership deal. So, a bit of both.
• “You haven’t reviewed anything in a while – why not?”
  I was actually planning to review all three demos that were released for the 360 during E3, but my Post E3 wrap-up took a lot more effort than I expected. And again with the lack of time. I’ve basically been working 60 hour weeks for the past couple in a row. I’m very tired. Regardless, I have a couple already started for some games that you’ll see in my “Currently Playing” section on the homepage. Can you guess which ones?
• “So, you’re doing freelance work full time now. Can you take on my project now?”
  A lot of people have got in touch over the past few months requesting my services. I turned the majority of them down simply because I had a full time job and didn’t want to spend all my waking hours working – although, I seem to be pretty close to that at the moment. I do have quite a bit lined up at the moment, but I will always be looking for new projects to work on. So by all means, get in touch if you have a project you think I would be a good fit for.

I need to wrap this up as I’m already going to hear “I told you so” from my wife in the morning. I should listen to her more. There really is no such thing as “a quick post”. Heh. Anyway, I spent my Saturday night re-jigging my site. I actually managed to get out in the real world and hit-up a rad ska show this afternoon in Toronto. So that should make up for it.

When it finally came back up, the performance was spotty and it was timing out every few clicks. After about an hour, it went offline again. This time for approximately an hour and a half. That was the final straw for this guy. I contacted Media Temple and told them what was happening and asked if I could get setup with the 9rules partnership program. Less than 20 minutes later I heard back from Jason who welcomed me to Media Temple with the partnership package. As soon as my account was ready (which was about 10 minutes), I started moving my site over. Not how I wanted to spend my evening, to say the least. But now I know I’m in good hands at Media Temple and I’m kicking myself for putting off moving to them for so long. I had planned to move when their new Shared-Server 6 packages are released, but I simply wasn’t going to just sit here and do nothing while 1&1 sits there and does nothing.

Man, I tell ya. I’ve had no luck with hosting. Let’s hope my days of down-time and waiting for days on end for a reply from tech support “experts’ is over. Oh, I actually heard back from 1&1 only 2 days after the incident. That’s a record for them! Not that they were much help. though…

We apologize for the inconvenience.

We encountered some technical problems on our servers. Everything is
working fine now. Please check websites again.

To which I replied…

Nice to hear from you… two days late, though. I’ve already moved my site to Media Temple as I can’t afford this kind of down time and your support response time is completely ridiculous – especially in critical situations such as this. I realize you’re one of the cheapest hosting providers around, but it’s just not worth it.

Now that I’m back online and don’t have to worry about random 404s showing up instead of my site, my series of E3 wrap-up posts will continue… tomorrow.

New Stuff

When I first started thinking about the changes I was going to make, positioning content was a subject I wanted to address but wasn’t sure where I was going to go with it. I knew I had to shift the focus on the homepage, and I’ve done just that. One of the big things you should take note of is the new Reviews section. I decided, with the amount of work that goes into them and the positive feedback I’ve been receiving, it would be worth separating Reviews from regular posts and giving the most recent review a dedicated spot on the homepage.

The other new addition is a Frequently Asked Questions page. Not nearly as cool or interesting, but definitely necessary judging by my inbox. I threw this together pretty quick and will no doubt be adding more answers as the days go by.

Ads! I’ve hooked up a couple partnerships that I’m really stoked to be in ka-hoots with. I’ve only got the GameWallpapers.com ads running currently, but will have the others in rotation in the coming weeks. They’re all directly related to this site, the content or myself and should really be of interest to you. As you might know, I’ve had a hard time finding an advertising solution, but could really use a little extra pocket change for my efforts.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I was previously using Rollyo for search, but decided to go back to the standard WordPress search with some added goodness to make it more usable. It’s a site-wide search, so it will return results from the about page, faq, etc. as well as posts. And I’ve used a couple plugins to highlight your search phrase and grab a chunk of content surrounding your phrase so you can see how relevant the results are at a glance, without having to click-thru. The search field can be found in the sidebar of all pages and posts.

The Homepage – Syndication Central

The homepage is almost fully dynamic now, which is just plain awesome! I must thank Clay Loveless for the custom tailored syndication script he threw together for me. Without it, I’d be hacking WP plugins to get the results I need – which is what I was previously doing.

I know I’m going to get a lot of questions about my Xbox Live Gamercard on the homepage and I plan to write about how I pieced that together some time soon. It actually only took about 10 minutes to do using this script to pull the data.

I now have my top 10 artists of the week list in place of the album covers from the ‘Rocking My Socks’ section. It was just too much work to keep up and I was only changing them out once a month at best. This is now pulled from the Last.fm servers and is updated once a week.

The Portfolio section is powered by Carbonmade – an awesome, free service for showcasing your work. Whatever it might be. They’re still in beta and getting things sorted out. But it’s shaping up nicely and the guys behind the project are very open to suggestions at this point.

Lots More to Come

Although I was ‘finished’ putting everything together nearly a week ago, I still have quite a bit to do around here. None of which is crucial, or it would already be done. Mostly lingering to-dos and enhancements.

And for those that are hating the white and pink combo (which I’ve name Pretty in Pink). ‘Black in Black’ will be making an appearance, or reappearance very soon.

Lastly, I’ve been working away on the Feed Icons site and was hoping to Reboot it today as well, but that’s not going to happen. It’s nearly complete, not ready for prime time. Everyone who’s involved in the project lead very busy lives and I don’t want any losing sleep over a volunteer, freebie project. So it will launch when we’re done. I’m hoping this will happen some time later in May. Fingers crossed!

Shit, I started that last paragraph with ‘lastly’. Lastly… for real this time, I haven’t even run the site through the validators, so please don’t start pointing out errors just yet. I’ll get it all cleaned up in time. This is actually a bad time to be launching a new site for me as my Mom and sister are visiting for the weekend and I’m hardly around.

With all that said, I hope you like the new design and find the changes I’ve made useful. I could hardly wait to let it loose. So here it is…

In all seriousness though, things are coming along great! Last week I wrapped up the design for both sites (feedicons.com and my own). I’m really stoked with the outcome of each and can’t wait to launch them. But the work that lies between now and May 1 scares the shit out of me. I’m going to have to create a mirror of my site where I can work on implementing the new design without disrupting things for you. Then, hopefully, it’ll just be a matter of moving over the new design to the live site. Hopefully.

On the Feed Icons front, I’m a little behind. I was hoping to have the XHTML and CSS work done by Wed of this week, but that didn’t happen. It’s not that I didn’t work on it – I spent a few nights in a row working on it. Whenever I design sites, I take into account how I’m going to build it so I don’t get myself in trouble when the time comes to make it happen. For whatever reason, I stopped doing this a couple months ago and have basically just been designing blind – then worrying about how I’m going to implement the second I fire up Dreamweaver. Silly of me? Perhaps. But I’ve really felt challenged lately and at the end of the day, am more content with what I’ve accomplished. So maybe I’ll keep this trend going.

Speaking of trends – dark sites seem to be popping up all over the place lately. It’s cool for sure, cause I love the dark. But at the same time, I like stand out in the crowd so I’ve drastically changed my colour scheme of the new design. And on that note, I leave you a teaser of both sites I’ll be Rebooting on May 1.