Yes,  I did it. I made a site in under 30 minutes. Even though I am not a designer and my CSS skills are limited to the very basics and.. copying and pasting. Before I show you the result, as well as what I used and how I did it – why does time even matter when setting up a site?

Well, you’re busy right? And spend your time mostly on what the day brings, correct?

It’s the exact same thing for me. Before I know it, the day is over. And, nothing structural has been accomplished. And that’s just wrong. Nowadays, you need to be constantly building.  To be able to do that, when you’re already busy is hard.

Unless…

You make it easy on yourself. And that’s exactly what I did. See the result here:

An example of what the 30 minute site looks like

Now, I have one thing to admit… The text and the graphics were made in advance. I still had to:

- Make the categories for the different products

- Make the drop caps (the red letter that starts the page)

- Insert the image and text

So what’s the secret?

Well, it’s using software you’re familiar with. In my case, the Smart FTP, WordPress and Thesis. Which leads to step 2, using software that makes stuff easy and efficient for you.  And that’s what these 3 do for me.

In a next post, I’ll show you how.

Thanks,

Otto

Hi there,

I have been looking into desing and typography recently. And that’s because I was somehow bothered by how the text looked on our sites (like www.beamax.com). I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.  When I set the max. width for the text, it all became clear. It needs some fine tuning, but it looks a lot better now.

On the blog too, you’ll see a nice drop cap (the red letter at the beginning of each post) and the teaser text of the old articles in red. That’s all thanks to the new version of my theme and with some coding help of www.thesishacker.com

It’s fun to learn some CSS in the process…

That’s all as far as styling and design is concerned. It’ll be a work in progress. More importantly, there’s some exciting news at Projecta. There’s a new MD – again. Da-lite issued a press release last week. But, they didn’t say why. I know and I’ll tell you in the next post.

Stay tuned,

Otto

I have to admit, I am not a tech guy. I’ve got the basics down, but the rest..I have it done for me.

Yeah, call me lazy.

The result has been messing around with the blog themes, eventually leading to me messing things up and losing a year’s worth of posts. Luckily, I only post a couple of times a month, but still annoying.

So, I finally found a great wordpress theme: Thesis

I like it because it’s easy to manage, from SEO to styling it.

Let.s look at styling.  The theme looks great from the get-go, but you might want to add your own images in stead of the standard ones.

And that’s easy:

1. Find some pictures you like (if you don’t have any, go to www.flickr.com)

2. Don’t take images that are too big. The frame adjusts automatically, which is great, but you don’t want your images to take up the full screen.

3. Upload them to the following directory on your server: yourdomain/wordpress/wp-admin/wp-content/themes/thesis/rotator

Replace “yourdomain” with the directory name of your website. If you don’t know how to do this, ask someone to help you.

Done!

An option would be to delete the standard images, so you never see those again. They’re nice though, so you might want to leave them.

It’s that easy.

The most difficult thing is to upload the images, especially if you’ve never done that. The company that hosts your website surely can help you with that.

So, now all you need to do is get the theme. You can do that by going to the Thesis site.

More Thesis tips next time.

Otto