Where have I been the past six months?

I’ve been mulling over the current status and the direction of GrandmasterB.com for awhile now, and it’s been a bit of a battle for me. I’ve contemplated weeding out content, starting over from scratch and at one point scrapping the entire blog for something different.

After careful consideration, I’ve decided that I took the site in the wrong direction trying to make money off of the site in the wrong manner. I tried to pump up the stats and page views with irrelevant content and compromised the integrity of the great content that I already had. (more…)

I recently had the pleasure of working with the fine folks at Thorn Technologies on a custom Wordpress theme for their client Technology Specialists (TSI). TSI is an information technology company out of Annapolis, Maryland. They specialize in providing local, state and federal government agencies with technology solutions for their businesses.

The task at hand with this project was first and foremost a clean, professional new look for their corporate website. The second requirement that they had was the site had to be easy to update and add new content. We found that using Wordpress as the platform for the site would work perfectly for TSI’s requirements. (more…)

Holy Cow! It has been a long time since I’ve written any new posts on the site. I don’t know if any of you are still out there, but if you are I’m sorry it’s been so long. I know we all get busy and have a hard time finding the necessary time to write new posts, but I’ve been SUPER BUSY! The blog design/development business has really taken off and I have a lot of finished projects to add to the portfolio and a lot to show off. I have been working on a lot of projects simultaneously, and two of them are fairly close to 100% completion…but I’m not ready to close the book on them quite yet.

My latest project just finished up today, and I must say it is a huge improvement over the previous design. The sports blogging community has been kind to GrandmasterB and in turn, I have been turning out some of my best design work. Jesse from PistonsNationBlog.com contacted me around mid-June to work on a new theme design for his site. Before I go much further, I must mention that this theme is not a GrandmasterB original. Jesse purchased a template theme called “Bright” from ThemeForest.net and I added some of my flair to the design to incorporate his new logo and color scheme.

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From time to time, I get questions about how I start designing websites, and how I build custom WordPress themes for my clients. I’ve spent the better part of the last year trying to streamline the process of designing and launching a blog theme. The problem that I have is I tend to get a little carried away with trying to be perfect. Like most designers I start out with the basic tools…pencil and paper. I draw out the layout and figure out the basic positioning of all of the necessary elements before I even think about putting anything down in Photoshop. That drawing stays with me until the very end of the project, and sometimes even after just for reference.

How Does GrandmasterB Layout a Site for WordPress?

Recently, Forest from The Random Forest and Frugal Zeitgeist hit me up on Google Chat to ask me how I build a Wordpress theme and how I go from Photoshop layout to coding everything for Wordpress. Well, I know that I’m not the only designer/developer that works this way, but I build a simple HTML/CSS file that will serve as a template for the coding of the WordPress theme. In my opinion, there’s no reason to mess with all of the WordPress options and variables unless you have already solidified the design in it’s simplest form. I break down the design into the most simplest elements first:

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Over the weekend, I put the finishing touches on another custom WordPress theme by The BlogFixers. Jeff and I were commissioned by Matt from YepYep to do a complete overhaul of his existing site and create a new theme from the ground up. We worked with Matt throughout the entire process from the brainstorming phase (how many columns, column widths, etc), through the design phase with Photoshop comps and finally the finished product which went live yesterday. The cool thing about this project is this was my first attempt at developing a three column WordPress theme. While I worked on the design with Matt, Jeff worked on getting his server configurations tweaked and dealt with some issues that Matt was having with the WP Super-Cache plugin.

Upgrades and Improvements

As I already stated the new theme is three columns now, as opposed to the previous theme which had only two columns. When designing the new header section I wanted to give the logo a little more flare, so I decided to place it at a bit of an angle and added in some gradient effects. The background behind the logo got a bit of a treatment as well with the addition of a few carefully placed graphic elements. Moving down we created a navigation bar with buttons for the many featured categories of the site. Previously, Matt didn’t have any navigation…this was a big improvement.

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