Tucson Website Design and WordPress Development

Basic SEO for WordPress theme developers

Pulished on September 12, 2009 by: Josh

Generally the last thing people think about when building a WordPress theme is search optimization. Features and design come first, and search optimization generally comes last or not at all. This article will discuss a few easy steps to make your WordPress theme a little friendlier to search engines. More specifically I’ll concentrated on explaining why it’s a good idea to optimize your WordPress theme, what the key elements of good on page SEO are, and discuss today’s best practices for on page SEO when designing websites that use WordPress as a CMS.

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Designing download buttons with Inkscape

Pulished on August 22, 2009 by: Josh

Designing download buttons for websites with Inkscape.

This is a quick to tutorial to show you how to create a contemporary download button in Inkscape.

1. Set up your document

Open up a new document in Inkscape and then edit your document properties so your page is 140 pixels wide by 40 pixels tall. Feel free to choose different dimensions if this doesn’t fit your needs or you can use the default settings and just export the drawing (as opposed to the page) when you’re finished.

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Redesign Summer 2009

Pulished on August 18, 2009 by: Josh

If you’ve visited here before you might notice that this site has just received a major overhaul. One of my main goals with this design was to improve the navigation and make it easier for people to access and find content. I also wanted to make it easier for people to get in touch, request proposals, and provide a better explanation of how our web design process works. I’ll discuss the motivations behind this design, the process, and some of the sites new features.

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Motivation for a new design

Pulished on June 15, 2009 by: Josh

Our website is just fine how it is, but I wanted to make information for potential clients easier to access and quickly scan. On the most basic level, I really just wanted to reorganize our about page and add our design and development process in a four column grid below our elevator pitch. The idea was that this four column grid would sit below the a three column grid (the same grid as the current homepage) with some relevant information about Tucson Labs and our services.

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Nikko Icons Beta Release

Pulished on March 21, 2009 by: Josh

After countless hours of design work, I’m proud to release the first beta version of the Nikko Icon set. I’m also releasing a completely free “web edition” that contains 99 high quality icons. These web edition icons were create for people that don’t use Gnome but would like to use the icons for other purposes. The downside to the web edition is that it’s an incomplete set (it only contains icons that are 48 pixels in width and height). However, if you want all of the icons, they’re included in the Gnome edition – you just have to dig.

The changes for this release include:

  • # New navigation icons
  • # Most icons are now using the Tango color palette
  • # A lot of new application Icons
  • # New mimetypes

Get more info and download it here.

Creating Patterns in Inkscape

Pulished on March 19, 2009 by: Josh

Patterns with Inkscape

Background patterns are a great tool for web designers. A current trend on the web is to use a pin stripe pattern that repeats and is set at a 45 degree angle for a background image. This tutorial will explain how to convert vector objects in Inkscape into patterns that you can use in your design. I’ll discuss how to create this pin stripe pattern and also provide a work around for a fairly annoying pattern gap bug that affects Inkscape .47 and below.

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Tucson Labs gets a new web design

Pulished on September 23, 2008 by: admin

I’ll be returning to Tucson in less than two months and I felt it was necessary to give the site a clean redesign. For this particular design, I chose to use a much wider layout than I previously used. I also made it both a fixed-width three column layout and a fixed-width two column for a few pages. I completely redesigned the structure of the homepage, design page, contact page, and articles page. For the articles and about pages, I chose to use a two column layout that was fairly similar to the previous design. I updated the logo slightly, and I ditched the adobe house (the lab) in favor of the lone saguaro. I still have a lot of little things I’d like to implement, but I thought I better get out what I had now and make small additions down the road. I’d say it’s about 95% complete. Please let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.

Designing Websites With Inkscape

Pulished on December 12, 2007 by: Josh

design-web-inkscape

Inkscape is a great program to have in your toolbox as a web designer. It’s similar to Adobe Illustrator, but the user interface and tools are slightly different. It’s also an open source program released under the GPL, and is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. This program can be used on on its own without the use of photo editing software like Photoshop or Gimp to create professional websites. This tutorial will walk you through some basic techniques for creating websites with Inkscape using this very basic blog design as a guide.

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