Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

I’m finding that my inspiration comes in waves, and that there isn’t much time in between the waves. My skills are growing at the same time, which intensifies the inspiration. This is good, I suppose, but I’m kind of exhausted. I’ve been working on a theme for days and this theme is more complete and more [...]

I was recently half shocked when a client requested I design a flyer for them. I do print design, but only for my web design clients that need something. I actually really like it, but it’s been a while, and I had to regroup my thoughts on what was important for this kind of design. Luckily [...]

I’ve been doing this for a little while now, and I’m finding that my design aesthetic is changing, maturing slowly. I’m very happy about it. If you look around the web, there are primarily four kinds of web design. Big professional or business sites, like Amazon or Digg, are designed well enough. They’re not incredibly creative, [...]

Don Norman talks about the three ways good design makes you happy. Presentations like this are always very helpful when you need perspective. Very applicable to web design.

So I just updated one of my “older” blogs to make the search results and archive pages (date, tag, and category pages) much more user friendly, and an amazing thing happened. My page views went way up. You have to remember people might come to your blog because of one thing, but hopefully once they [...]

With sites like Designoplasty with multiple post formats, it’s an interesting challenge to integrate photos and videos. You have the main post format which will accommodate your desired photo or video size. Maybe you have a thumbnail for one of the photos. But what about thumbnails for video, multiple photos, or cases where you don’t [...]

CHIDIMAR and Smashing Magazine have teamed up and released a free Cafe Icon Set. Icons seem to be coming back into style, and they really work well with the Designoplasty theme. They are very handy for adding some spice to an otherwise text heavy blog post.

Themes are wonderful things, but if you could have any theme you wanted, what exactly would that theme need? Tons of sidebars, widgets, and ads? Or none of that? I give my thoughts on the matter.

This is probably the hardest I’ve ever worked on a WordPress theme so far. I’m sure there are a few bugs, but I went out of my way to make sure as much was themed properly as I could. The search results, archives, pages, are all themed appropriately. The hardest part was actually the search box [...]