I can’t show you the work yet, as it’s still underway. But I did want to let you know that we do accept theme customization work. We have developed custom plugins for existing themes, and have done total design overhauls.

Some of the existing WordPress themes offer excellent bases for customization. We enjoy working with them so much, we’re developing our own set of themes to be released in early next year. More details will be forthcoming.

We’d love to talk with you about your design or development needs. Please use the info on the contact page to get in touch.

Thanks!

If you’ve got questions, I’d love to help if I can. Follow @theblogstudio.com, and address your question us using @theblogstudio. I’ll do my best to answer any and all comers!

Twitter is an amazing tool. Much like blogging, it can help you find people interested in the same topics as you. Try using twitter search to search for keywords relevant to your interests or your habits, and I guarantee that you’ll find something you didn’t know before.

In the spirit of forcing myself to finish this thing, I thought I’d show you a bit of a teaser. The image below is very much a work in progress. Certain elements will probably make it through to the final, while others won’t. The theme release is about a week away. It will be our holiday gift to you.

So without further ado, here’s a wee look:

Five days have passed, so I thought I’d have a look at the search results to see if we’re ranking any higher for “blog design”. We are, but only by a single spot. However, looking at the cached versions of our site on Google, I see that the site hasn’t actually be indexed in about 6 days. So, the changes to the home page aren’t yet being reflected. Should be interesting to see what happens. As a side note, the search results for “blog design” are very volatile. I see a lot of change in the listings from day to day.

I’m chomping at the bit to try a couple of other SEO tweaks, but I’m trying to be smart about this by making one change at a time, so it’s effect can be measured.

Next up: waiting to see what effect the home page change has, then diving into meta description. Fun!

I think the drop in position was timed with our redesign. One of my goals was to reduce the number of words on the home page. I wanted to let the video and the work speak for itself. In retrospect that might have been a bad decision. Looking at the folks who have taken over “our” position on the search results, the thing that is most obvious is that they have a LOT of written content on their home page. I’ve made some adjustments to the home page to lengthen the post excerpts, and rejigged the layout slightly.

As of today, we’re the 13th result for “blog design” on google. I’m going to give Google a few days to see if this change has any effect. I will, of course, report my findings!

Why on earth are we doing this, you ask? Well, it’s simple really. Adam, Mike, and Lucia are super busy with some top-secret development work, leaving me with a bit of time on my hands. I’m sitting here feeling all guilty while the rest of the team is slaving away, so I thought I’d try a little experiment to see if I can single-handedly book a couple of new projects between now and the end of the month.

To be clear: we’re talking full-on custom design here people. Check out our portfolio of work to see what I’m talking about. We’re also talking full service. Read a few testimonials from past clients to get a sense of the kind of service we’re known for.

This is very much a limited time promo though, as we have a couple of new projects starting up in the new year that will keep us all occupied. So if ever you’ve thought about having a completely customized blog or website built just for your needs, act now, and buy yourself a flat screen tv with your savings!

As you’ll see, I started with one clear idea: make use of watercolour to create a bit of a sophisticated feel. Through a gazillion revisions, you can see that idea develop. I went pretty far down one path, but the intent in the original use of the watercolour had been lost. I literally wiped the slate clear of all colour, and immediately felt like I had it.

In retrospect, I may have gone a bit too far on the dark colours in reaction to the visual direction of the earlier versions. Perhaps it’s time to tinker a bit!

As an aside, looking back at this slideshow posted below, it’s interesting to see how may versions the scan of the watercolour went through. I was determined to find a way to use it!

Let’s say you post something to a site. A couple of days later you re-read it, and cringe at some particularly clumsy turn of phrase. What do you do?  For the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re not changing the value or meaning of your post. You’re just making it read better. Do you:

A. Just go in and fix the section.
B. Leave it be if it’s an hour or so since hitting publish.
C. Edit the post, but include a note.
D. Somethin’ else.

I’m leaning towards A myself, but I’m sufficiently unsure as to write this post!

TBS-Wordpress_Walkthrough.pdf <-- Link to the guide

This guide was created by Mike Caputo our fabulous developer. The guide barely touches the surface of what this CMS is capable of doing, however, we think that we've covered the bare essentials for someone who is getting started with blogging. These things include basic tasks like:

1. Adding Categories to posts
2. Adding Tags to posts
3. Adding Pages
4. Adding links
5. Entering basic content
6. Entering custom field data

We will update the guide as feedback pours in - so please feel free to leave you questions or comments.

The root of the cause and it’s simple solution is best explained in this article.  To summarize: it’s the colour profiles stored with the images. Safari honours them. Others don’t. Frankly, I prefer the way Safari handles it, and wish other browsers would follow suit. By specifying a colour profile, the designer can more accurately predict the way the image will look on a variety of monitors.

I believe I am over-simplifying things somewhat. No doubt someone will tell me that we’re always going to be dependent on how the user has his or her monitor configured. Still, I’ll take some control over none, thank you very much.