Lately it seems everyone I know is interested in window blinds and shades. A good friend has established a site on bamboo blinds that I helped out with out, mainly aesthetics, programming and SEO.

And then most recently my Mom has decided she loves Hunter Douglas blinds so much she wants to review them!  Many of her friends have purchased Hunter Douglas window treatments, so I guess it’s quite easy for her to get hands-on with these and talk to people who have them in their homes. And while she is about it she can grab some good pics as well!

So I helped out with the design of Bamboo Blinds as mentioned, my good friend Violeta has written all the reviews and information for the site – I designed the Joomla template, which incidentally will be released over on Joomlabear shortly under the title “Notebook Template”.

The site is built on the Joomla Content Management System and also used the K2 Extension which provides a lot of additional options for organizing and formatting Joomla content. One example is Tags, something Wordpress does out of the box but which Joomla is sadly lacking at this point.

K2 bridges this weakness and we can see an example of a K2 Tags page here: Bamboo Blinds for Sliding Glass Doors. The benefits of tagging are definitely worth the additional effort – Search Engines love them and users love them too – Tags provide a great way to organize and explore content.

The last thing I wanted to mention in today’s rambling post is my Mom’s site on Hunter Douglas Blinds. This is built with Wordpress and is just a skeleton currently, but I like to work this way when designing because it gives me some  text based content to work with, really useful to get a feel for how the site will behave with images, long pages, etc. I also like to get my Wordpress optimization sorted out first because it gives us a head-start in the search engines

I can spend weeks tweaking a layout until I’m happy with it – but it’s always good to remember search engines don’t look at all that fancy design stuff – they read the text and make an assessment of  what your site offers from this – so if the copy is on hand it’s very good to get this up immediately and then refine the layout as you go.

My next post will actually step you through my Wordpress setup and optimization process so you can see exactly what I do.

Until then.

My good friend Violeta has overhauled her website Tips and Tricks. She’s used the Thematic theme by Ian Stewart from ThemeShaper, a Wordpress theme I am very impressed with. At present Violeta has been working on the layout and placing modules to display “Recent Tips”, etc.

Already the site has a clean and minimalist feel that reminds me of the design used over at the NY Times. Thematic theme has really nice typography out of the box and makes for a very ‘readable’ blog.

As I understand it, Violeta’s intention is to customise the header in due course, and add a little colour and style. Thematic also makes this very easy if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty and diving into a little HTML and CSS.

Thematic is also a very well search engine optimised theme, with H1 tags for your blog description on the home page, but H1 applied to post titles on post pages – sexy! There are some other quite advanced SEO things happening under the hood, and it will be interesting to get a report from Violeta on the search engine performance of Tips and Tricks a month or so from now.

In summary I really like what Violeta has done and I think the Thematic Wordpress theme framework is a great starting point for developing a new look for your Wordpress powered site!

Welcome, I’ve just put this blog up and am quite pleased with how it’s come together.

I wanted something very simple and minimalistic, where I could post my off-topic thoughts that do not fit into the context of my other web properties.

I started with Wordpress, an excellent free web publishing application – or blog. Installed this on a web host, and got down to finding myself a good clean wordpress theme that I could modify and build upon.

I settled for Empty Canvas by Romanian designer Adrian Diaconescu, It’s just what I was after, Thanks Adrian.

Next step was to create a simple, clean logo. When in need of a quick typography fix I usually head on over to DaFont, type in my text and then preview their top 100. A good place to start for logo design ideas.

Angelic War from Dirt2 caught my eye and I decided to have a play with this – I typed my surname, and name of this blog, “MacKinven” into Fireworks, my graphics application of choice, and then added a slight red gradient over the text, giving the result seen at the top of this page.

Happy so far.

Next up was getting my HTML Page Titles optimised for SEO. I found a great post from Nathan Rice, explaining how to do this. I made a couple of small modifications and ended up with this code:

<title>
<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>
<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> &mdash; <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php wp_title(”); ?> &mdash; <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>
<?php } ?>
</title>

Adding this to your header.php gives a nice Title tag for the home page that is the blog title and blog buy-line together – For posts this gives the post title first followed by the blog title.

Done! And welcome to the blog.