icons
I love designing icons. It’s something that I still do whenever I get a chance. I find it relaxing, as weird as that may seem.
We often use icons for the sites we design at World Wide Creative. In our quest to develop sites that are profitable for our clients, we have seen (and research about the fact) that well-designed icons make difference to usability. Read Further
word press
I recently attended the Wordpress Cape Town Meetup #3 and had a cracking time meeting up with some of Cape Towns most talented Wordpress evangelists and blogging heroes! Read Further
design muti
I’m pretty stoked to have found this: Design Float. It’s a Muti.co.za / Digg style design scrapheap. It’s now top on my Google Reader. Sweeet. Read Further
As many of you know there is a segment of the online “cash cow” dedicated to making money from developing and releasing Premium Themes for WordPress. A Premium Theme is basically a well developed/coded theme that you can use for your WordPress website. So in essence 1xWordPress install (FREE) + 1xPremium Theme = Rocking Website! Read Further
goose maverick
Remember Maverick and Goose in Top Gun? Goose was the wing man to Cruise’s Maverick. This meant that, when they’d go to a bar, Goose would be the fall guy and Maverick would score the chicks. Goose was married, so it was cool by him. He happened to be married to Meg Ryan in the movie, so he was stoked to let Maverick be the gloryboy, because that was back when Meg Ryan was really hot. (Just a little movie trivia for you on a Monday morning).
My question today is: ‘But, what if the chick went for Goose?’ Read Further
typography
It’s amazing how much detail goes into a website. Think of the functional components, programming technology, tags, site navigation and the personas. Phew! And that’s before we even touch the content.
Design is the glue that holds everything together. Read Further
vector art
A showcase of amazing talent. Once again a link to the brilliant Smashing Mag.
Classic stuff… [click here to view video] Read Further
The last couple of weeks I have been mouthing off about WordPress this and WordPress that, and so, it’s time to show you some examples of what can be achieved using this awesome platform. Read Further
standard bank
I was checking in on Muti today when I saw Coda’s entry ‘Standard Bank redesign’. I clicked through to check it out, and was gobsmacked by what I saw. [For our international readers, Standard Bank is South Africa's second biggest bank. Bear in mind that in South Africa, banks are hugely profitable and should really have a big budget for this kind of thing.] Read Further
You were introduced to WordPress in my previous post (Getting to know WordPress – The Basics) as a content management system and bloggin’ tool deluxe. This week I will introduce you to some of the features and show you how to add and manage your content. Read Further
Many of you already have your own blogs running on the open source, read “free”, platform WordPress, currently the best choice for a blog application. WordPress offers a rich set of blog features and has a massive supporting community. This usually means that software is well maintained and won’t disappear or run dry a few months down the line. If you are interested in finding out more about WordPress and its benefits, please contact the chefs. Read Further
We all know that link building is a vital element in your search engine optimisation strategy. But we should also know that not all links are created equal.
If Google really values the site linking to you, it is likely to generate more link juice for your site. Read Further
What makes a great designer? I compiled this list after a decade of trying to be one. (This list applies to graphic designers as well as web designers.) Read Further
Typically site design (and redesign) starts with the home page, laboring over the look and feel. As designers wait for content, the site is built following standard formulas and the goal of selling a product or service often becomes secondary. Deadlines are missed somewhere between the unpredictability of the creative process and the struggle for content, and eventually the management command becomes an exasperated: “Get the site up and fix it later!” The all important conversion pages receive minimal attention. Sales are lacklustre. Visitors abandon early. This is when conversion experts get involved. Read Further
I came across a fascinating post entitled ‘The Evolution of Tech Company’s Logos’. Check these examples out, and see if you can identify them:
Internet Explorer is the default web browser of the Windows operating system and this means that it is the browser used by most “day-to-day” internet users. The fact that most people have the Internet Explorer as their default browser does by no means make it the only browser and it definitely does not make it the best. I would like to open your eyes to some alternatives and hopefully enhance your future browsing experience. Read Further
There was a great deal of excitement in the World Wide Creative web studio today. Mostly from me actually. The reason for this, is because, after much deliberation, debate and watching of Deliverance*, we completed our brand new look for a tired old warhorse: The Heavy Chef blog. The idea was to retain a thread of consistency with the World Wide Creative corporate identity – which is clean spaces, white, blue and greyscale – and then combine it with the whole Heavy Chef vibe of scattering ingredients everywhere. Read Further
I wrote an article on Ideate a while back about originality, and how it was impossible to create something truly original. This is a semantic argument, and your conclusion will differ depending on your interpretation of the word ‘original’. Read Further
When I opened my del.icio.us account many moons ago, I was tagging everything I found like a kid with a new toy. One of the first sites I bookmarked never really lived up to my expectations and I haven’t re-visited it for years. However I stumbled upon it again this morning and
Flash is a bit of a flashpoint in the web industry. There are those that believe that it should be done away with altogether, and those that advocate it over everything else. Sort of like religion, it engenders extreme
views and not much in between. Read Further
As a web marketing company, World Wide Creative focuses a lot on the actual design and usability of the websites we’re marketing. One of our biggest headaches is cross-browser compatibility – arrgh. This means making the dammmm thing work in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, as well as Firefox (our browser of choice – download it here) and all the rest. Read Further
This article, maybe more than any other, explains why website design costs a fair amount of money if you want to get it done right. Great stuff from Joel Spolsky once again (lifted from his brilliant blog – Joel on Software).
Joel talks about the website designed by their chosen design firm. Joel goes through all the design phases and then tells them to ’start all over again’. Hectic. To the website firm: we feel your pain, whoever you are. This is something that we’ve experienced more than once.
We understand from the client’s perspective, and from our point of view, the site must be exactly right. Throw in browser compatibility at the end of the process, and you realise why the small guys are getting killed out there.
Web design is not for the faint hearted, fellas.
This piechart explains the pain we go through better than any words could. Read Further
The new guys (Shaun & Paul) in the studio have been doing some great work recently. Nothing like seeing a team develop. It brings a tear to the eye.
This one goes out to you fellas…
