Thesis Wordpress Design Tips » design

And the best time of the day to blog and tweet is…

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:07:33 +0000

Best tweeting time is 4:01 pm – some interesting stats from malcom coles :

Half of people read every tweet.
But 20% read only the last 20 tweets or less when they check Twitter.
At 11am-12pm, 51% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 31% are sending them – a margin of 20%.
At 4pm-5pm, 56% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 39% are sending them – a margin of 17%.
At 7-8pm, the margin is just 2% – people are more interested in tweeting than reading.
Weekend Twitter users are much more likely to be tweeting than weekday Twitter users who often just browse tweets.
As a proportion of all tweets, use of the term RT (for retweet) is highest at 4pm

Blog posts seem to depend more on your readers, content type (if it’s breaking), and consistency. Lorelle has a solid post on it, but it generally seems to be during the 9-5 working day. Being in Eastern Standard Time, I generally prefer around the 11-12pm hot zone, while being able to catch the morning readers on the west coast.

Another tip if you’re auto-tweeting or have feedburner subscribers is to set it at a time a few minutes off of the hour when other larger services are bulk mailing. ie. 11:55am.

Quick Social media solutions for your organization

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:32:19 +0000

Credit:Elliance

The State of the Internet

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:00:28 +0000

Some intriguing data by Focus that may make you want to tweak your web strategy.

Why Favicons and how to create them

admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:07:29 +0000

Favicons are tiny touches to your website that say you care about the details. It’s also important for branding. If you’ve already got some form of brand identity, why not put it everywhere you can?

Favicons are typically 16×16, 32×32 favicon.ico files that show up in your browser address bar, tabs, as well as bookmarked pages.

If you already have a simple image you can convert one easily with many favicon generators such as this

You can also design your own pixel-by-pixel from scratch through sites like this.

If you have the wordpress thesis framework you can easily add it through

1. Save it to the root directory of your blog.

2. Open WordPress dashboard and select Thesis options.

3. Scroll down to Header Scripts and copy-paste the following code in text field.

Designing for Trillions

admin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:36:01 +0000

Customize Google Forms

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:03:47 +0000

Google offers up a phenomenally easy way of creating a solid form you can integrate onto any site while integrating it into google spreadsheets on the back-end. However besides the preset themes they don’t offer up a way to customize it. ie. change the background color.

Here are some tips:

the form is embedded in an iframe, and it should use an embeddedform¹ type of URL
the iframe’s width and height as supplied by the Google form editor will probably need changing (to avoid scrollbars)
margin-width does not seem to work on the iframe, so one must use padding
the iframe has its colour and padding set as CSS styles in the section of the HTML file
the padding leaves a white border around the form, so one must use the magic mantra allowtransparency="true" in the iframe tag [thanks to ahab for digging this out]
one must append parameters to the key URL (the string &pli=0&ttl=1&bc=F6D478&f=Comic+Sans+MS&tc=c00&htc=666&lc=090&hl=en-gb ):
- pli=0 – we don’t know what this does!
- ttl=1 – turns the title “Form and format tester” on (ttl=0 turns it off)
- bc=F6D478 – sets the background colour in HTML-style RGB hex format²
- f=Comic Sans MS – sets the font (I don’t think you can set the size)
- tc=c00 – sets the text colour in HTML RGB Hex format (you can use 3 or 6 figures)
- htc=666 – sets the help text colour, i.e. for info such as “Please give your name”
- c=090 – sets the link text colour at the bottom in HTML RGB Hex format (the green stuff)
- hl=en-gb – sets the language³ for the form (the Submit button and green link text)

This works more or less the same in IE7, FF3 and Chrome at least (XP and Chrome) – there are minor differences in the amount of space inside the table border, and the appearance of the border itself, but the most noticeable thing is that the [Submit] button and text boxes pick up the Comic Sans font in FF and Chrome but not IE.

You can google for some more complex ways of changing the CSS of the embedded code they offer up, but these switches were the simplest way I’ve found so far.

Why WordPress | Thesis | Design ?

admin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:03:16 +0000

WordPress. Quite simply it is the blog platform of choice. I believe in allowing every voice to be heard and wordpress is designed for writers. It’s great for businesses and non-profits as well because search engines like google and bing always love fresh and current content. Having a blog using wordpress allows you to maximize your current skill sets and passions and gives you a great opening to planet online. WordPress has also evolved to a broader CMS / content management system that can match just about any other site you’d find online.

Thesis. What’s the point of great content if no one sees it? Thesis has rock solid search-engine-optimization handled behind the scenes. The code is crisp and clean and allows you to customize it without ruining the perfect code behind it all. Thesis helps eliminate weighty plugins and also has an incredible community-base that is all about customization and effective designs.

Design. If you’ve got great content, and someone manages to find it… will it stick? Is it compelling and inspiring? Will it draw people back or turn people off? What technical limitations can you push to wow your readers and viewers? Design matters. The medium quite often is the message.

My hope is to tackle all three of these spaces… especially as someone who is continuously learning myself. Stay tuned for the road ahead, lots of good stuff coming.