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October 22, 2008

Karn Skating Dynamics

Filed under: Design, Projects, WordPress Themes — mbeihoffer @ 11:33 am

We’ve recently launched the Karn Skating Dynamics website. This project was really fun to work on; Barry, Beau, and Jodi Karn are all really great people and fun to work with, and the project allowed us to work with the fantastic Revolution Pro theme pack from Brian Gardner.

Here’s a screenshot from the site’s front page:

Karn Skating Dynamics

Karn Skating Dynamics is the largest skating school of its kind in North America. The year round school has up to 450 students per week. In addition, we train and work to share our knowledge with hundreds of teams, coaches, hockey associations and clubs throughout the US and Canada. All told over the years, Karn Skating Dynamics has taught tens of thousands of students from the mites to the pros.

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December 27, 2006

Trying Nvu

Filed under: Design, Software Reviews — mbeihoffer @ 12:24 am

I’ve been looking for a good visual HTML/CSS editor, and although it was a bit of a handful to get it running, I now have Nvu running on my Debian laptop. I also just discovered Quanta Plus, which was installed by default with KDE (I think), so I’ll be attempting to learn one or both of these over the coming weeks.
When I found the Nvu website and read the summaries and looked at the screenshots, I got a tiny bit excited. It’s an open-source WYSIWYG editor for web pages that can (in theory) handle CSS, integrates with ftp/ssh site management, handles HTML forms, and is described on the Nvu website as being similar to Dreamweaver or Frontpage.

This would be helpful on some projects, obviously; my current technique of having a console window open with a screen session running, with the stylesheet on one screen, the header on another, the sidebar on another, the footer on yet another screen, (I know - it’s absolutely insane! but on the other hand, once you learn how to toggle from screen to screen with keyboard commands, it’s nearly instantaneous, and then you can alt-tab to your browser, hit F5, and see what your edits did, pretty quickly) well; that technique works fairly well for me, but it’s certainly a little cumbersome.

Ideally, I’d have a dual-screen setup when I do web development, with Firefox open and full-screened on the right, and the CSS/HTML files I’m editing on the left. I’d be able to make edits to the stylesheet, and whenever I saved the edit, the Firefox session would detect the file change and refresh the page automatically. That would be pretty slick.

Also, it would be helpful to be able to use a small set of graphic-design tools (i.e. bucket fill, gradient fill, replace color, etc) on a page mockup in realtime. Actually, Dreamweaver would be a fairly useful tool for the work I do (and for our company) if it ran on Linux, was free, and handled W3C compliant HTML generation a little better.

In any case, I’ll be updating this post every once in a while to let you know how it goes.

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December 21, 2006

Northstar Irrigation

Filed under: Design, Projects, WordPress Themes — nick @ 4:58 am

So I guess I’m a Web Developer. At least in the sense that I can build a web site for my friend and his irrigation business. This is the first site that I have done on my own, and I have to say that….it’s OK.

I think the biggest change this time around is that I have a much better grasp of how WordPress (PHP) and CSS function together to render the dynamic HTML that the user sees when they visit the actual site.

Although I’m a long ways off from writing an entire style sheet on my own, the theme that I developed for the site is mine (inasmuch as editing a few lines of the style sheet make you a theme developer).

Here she is:

Download the NorthstarIrrigation theme right here: northstarirrigationtar.gz

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November 29, 2006

Two New WordPress Themes

Filed under: Blog, Design, WordPress Themes — mbeihoffer @ 6:58 pm

I’m fairly satisfied with the two new WordPress themes I rolled out this week. They were, as you can see, very different projects altogether, but a good way for me to get back into the swing of CSS, WordPress, and typographical minutiae.

The first theme, Three Amigos, is a simple, modern theme I made with QuarkXpress and the G.I.M.P., and came together fairly well, in my opinion. It was mainly a chance for me to get more experience with typography and layout, and I was able to put some pictures of the lawyers into the theme, which was fun. I struggled for a while with being comfortable not rounding all the corners, which I am always sorely tempted to do, but I eventually pulled it together enough to roll it out.

I’m not sure if I should be “releasing” the theme or not, but I don’t really see why we shouldn’t have a copy on hand for internal reference, so here it is.

The Three Amigos theme by Mark Beihoffer for the attorneys over at False-Claims-Act.com.

Download three_amigos.tgz (16MB) Next, we have the super-girly and rather whimsical Magpie theme, which was also quite fun to make.

Michelle LeBlanc is the owner, and I was able to get her site rolled out today with the help of our friends at HostingAve.

I did run into a couple minor annoyances doing the migration, but as usual, they proved to be nothing more than some strange and errant server-side permissions problems, which were readily resolved through Konqueror’s ftp browsing capabilities.

All that aside, here is the Magpie Theme for your consideration. It’s certainly rather sparse, and some may not care for the color scheme much, but on the other hand, I think it will appeal to Michelle’s clientele, and the softness of the theme lends itself to showcasing some of her fashion sensibilities.

The last thing I would like to say about this project was that it really made me realize the importance and benefits that can result from spending a little time writing copy. I know it wasn’t exactly earth-shattering or profound, but Michelle got a few laughs out of my overly stimulated descriptions of their services, and hopefully it will inspire her to maintain a sense of humor when she crafts the actual site text.

(Unless she decides she wants to pay me to do it. I’m not turning down any work at this stage.)

The Magpie Boutique theme by Mark Beihoffer.

Download the Magpie WordPress theme (840MB)

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October 22, 2008

Karn Skating Dynamics

January 8, 2007

Free Rounded Corners Plugin for the GIMP

December 27, 2006

Trying Nvu

December 21, 2006

Northstar Irrigation

November 29, 2006

Two New WordPress Themes

November 17, 2006

New WordPress Theme