In my Week in Review post for October 20th, I mentioned that I had been working on a “secret” project for a client of mine and that we would probably be launching the site on or around November 3rd. Unfortunately, we didn’t make our November 3rd launch…but November 11th is just as good. The project as you might be able to tell was a redesign of Cuzoogle. Cuzzy had been talking about redesigning his site for awhile now and giving it a more updated look. We both sat down (cross-continent) and came up with an interesting layout that would allow for him to put in his necessary ad spots as well as something that looked fan-freakin’tastic!

While this project wasn’t a completely custom theme; we did start off with the basic layout from the Simple Red Theme from Easy Wordpress that Cuzzy had been using. The biggest challenge in getting everything looking as it should were the widgets that Cuzzy uses for advertising. They took some tweaking, but they all fell into place like they should. The new theme is in between Evolutionary and Revolutionary when it comes down to it. Since the original theme had a lot of good quality stuff already built-in, we didn’t need to revolutionize the theme…however, the design elements added were HUGE improvements over the old version.

This is a quick breakdown of all of the new added features… (more…)

Another month has come and gone as 2008 is coming to a close; I cannot believe that time is flying by so fast. GrandmasterB has been in existence now for eight months now, and I’m making tremendous strides in the community and finally finding out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to blogging. There are still a few things that I can’t seem to figure out though, like how in the hell does Alexa work? Is it even worth trying to figure out? I’m beginning to think that the system is flawed and really isn’t worth spending anymore time on. I actually ranked higher in Alexa when I wasn’t paying any attention to it. I really don’t have the time to worry about it anyways…I have a booming web design business taking over my life.

What started off as just an idea between two fellow bloggers has taken off and turned into a full fledged small business. Jeff and I currently have three projects in the works and there are more coming down the pipeline. We are in the process of setting up all of the legal information, and getting an online presence setup for the company. We have already registered the domain name and setup the hosting for it; however, we are probably looking at January or later before we launch the site. The new venture is aptly named Blog Fixers dot com, and as you might expect we specialize in setting up and fixing issues with our client’s blogs. We are not going to limit ourselves to only working on blogs though; with Jeff’s programming expertise and my design skills, we will be expanding our horizons to include custom CMS development, custom website design and much more. Until we get our website launched, I will be posting all of our work under my Design Services section. If it gets too big, I will create a separate section for my Portfolio.

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Go Media - 10 Tips to Avoid Designer’s Block
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Photoshop Lady - A New Way to Create Super 3D Text
CSS-Tricks - How Would You Recommend a Novice Get Started Using CSS
PSDTUTS - Design a High Impact Gig Poster
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Another week is in the books, can you believe that it’s almost mid-October already? Last week I put the finishing touches on the first project that Jeff and I collaborated on. Mike Hayes commissioned Jeff and I to create a custom designed theme for WordPress and migrate his existing Blogger site over to the new domain: SteadyBurn dot net. The design process was interesting, because Jeff and I didn’t know a whole lot about Mike or hist existing blog. Through some research and tweaking we were able to come up with a unique look that Mike was very happy with.

The theme has some cool design elements that were implemented to improve the visitors experience as well. I had read a tutorial on CSS-Tricks awhile back that would allow you to add some flare to your date badges, and implement a comment bubble to the top corner that displays the total comments on the post. It’s a very easy trick to implement into your design. I did change up the date badge a bit to make it fit the color scheme of the site. The original tutorial uses a different color for each month, but it looked a bit cartoony for this design.

Another cool element of the design are the transparent content boxes. If you look closely you can see the background carries into the left column box. It took some tweaking to get it to look right and not take away from the content, but it turned out great! Overall, this project was a lot of fun to do and in the end Mike was very happy with the design…which is what matters the most.

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Cuzoogle - The 2nd Annual Bow-wow-WOW!
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