Tag Archives: design

Nothing Motivates Writing Like a New Theme Design

WordPress.com Twenty Twelve Theme Design

I know to non-bloggers, writing a blog post about blogging is a kin to photographers talking about equipment (which we love to do), but to the rest of the world, it’s… boring… that is unless you love photography, or in this case blogging. If you know WordPress, their mantra is Code is Poetry, and maybe that’s why I love their coding.

Funny thing is, I find more people interested in new theme designs than I find people interested in writing on their blogs so go figure. I really try not to change themes too often, and Google doesn’t like it all that much either, but this time my last highly customized premium them, called Portfolio by WordPress only lasted about 3-4 months (see scalability issue below).

It’s Not the Theme It’s the Content

I’m not really sure why this is, but it seems to be true, even though I refute the notion when asked. I hear it all the time… if I just had a new, fresh, nice looking, well designed, custom coded, update to my blog, I would write more. And every time I hear that, my response is always the same. If you don’t write on your blog when it’s ugly-ish your not going to write on your blog when it’s beautiful. The phrase amongst websites and blogs that “content is king” has been true for years, and will remain true for all foreseeable futures of Internet knowhow. There is just nothing that makes up for good content. If you doubt this, just check out three of the worst designed websites on the Internet; Craigslist, Drudge Report, and Reddit, who are also some of the highest traffic sites on the Internet.

Still, every time I update my theme (which I try not to do very often), I get reinvigorated and excited about my blog. I still think my advice holds true, forget your design and just start posting good content and the design will works it’s way in. If you are in the habit of producing high quality, consistent content already, a new theme will be even more invigorating.

The New Twenty Twelve WordPress Theme

Some of the most versatile website designs today are from WordPress. I have written on them many times before so I won’t repeat that here, but if you have that strong desire to change designs like you change Facebook profile pics, WordPress is for you, at least theme wise. For the first time, I have gone with a custom design of a default WordPress theme from the guys over at Automattic, called Twenty Twelve, so this them I used here is available to anyone with a WordPress blog.

My top priorities when it comes to design are readability, typography, clarity, customization, scalability to move from one design to another, and a design that will fade into the background allowing the images and writing to take over, and Twenty Twelve hit these requirements quite well. This new them has one thing my previous theme didn’t have, the ability to move on to the next theme. The greater the customization, the harder it is to move on to the next code.

Twenty Twelve, launched on August 28, 2012, this theme is now going to sit as the WordPress default theme, an update to their “Twenty something” series of themes. It uses a new typography from Google (Open Sans), which is one of the most readable sets they have produced. If you have a WordPress blog, check it out, but you might already be using the theme and just didn’t know it. Thanks for another great theme WordPress. In my relentless desire to find the cleanest, minimalist theme design, you have brought me one step closer to perfection, at least in my mind.

Quick Update on My Blog Design and Format

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First of all, I’ll say right off, I’m not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but sometimes I do it just to organize things out in my own mind as well, that’s what this is then. I hear it all the time, if I get a better, newer, and more fresh looking design, I’ll blog more, but that rarely happens. It’s like waiting to do something until the circumstances are just right in your mind, and often times, they never will be. That said, I do think there is a hint of truth to those statements, so over the weekend, after (literally) years of searching, I found one of my favorite customizable WordPress.com designs called Portfolio. So I wanted to make three quick points below today about my world of blogging.

A Little About the Versatility of WordPress as a Platform

WordPress is such an extremely versatile platform. Over the course of 10+ years now, this site has developed into far more than a blog to me, and much of that has to do with the ability that WordPress.com and WordPress.org (there is a difference, see also WordPress Self Hosted vs WordPress.com Hosted Blog Pros Cons :: Review), gives its users. As I have said many times over the years, your blog can be far more than just a place to type a few sentences, you can do that on Facebook. I really have such a narrow view on digital world design and organization, much of which I actually owe to my son and his design abilities, that nothing really ever quite fit my perfect balance of minimalist design, good typography, ability to showcase photography and writing, and so on, but this finally comes close.

A Little About Blog Purpose and Site Organization

Over time, I have begun to heavily filter what I placed on my blog, and what I write on my blog, much to my own dismay. To keep this creative avenue alive in my mind, I actually went to a few anonymous blogs, which as of now, I have combined and imported into this blog, with the intention of continuing those posts alive over here, even if they are trivial, unpolished thought, or just a photo with some comments. These other two sites were specifically for unpolished writing and photos. The writing site was writing only, no photos, and was called Religitic Writing at Religitic.com, which can now be found here under the Religitic tag. The other was photos with only a caption, or a short story, and those are now located in my Gallery and Stories section.

With this new design, I have created a front “home page,” which is a landing page for some featured posts. The rest should be self explanatory by following the menu at the top, but I have a “blog” link now that takes you to the chronological list of posts on my site. I redesigned and updated the About Page and some other organizational things, which hopefully will make navigation cleaner.

A Little About My Intentions Moving Ahead

Throughout the time I have spent on my site I have tried to keep a consistent collection of content, or to remain true to my personal mission statement if you like, and my focus will continue to be for that end. I started this overhaul to my blog earlier in the year (sorry to my RSS readers who are constantly being bombarded with old post updates), and I now see it will probably take the rest of the year to complete. Because content is king, and always has been, that will be the other focus on the future of this site. This means I really hope to continue posting new stories, gallery items, and text only content on various topics that are a little less filtered.

I recently told someone that they really can’t personally create a blog or website anymore where the content was duplicated in another place, or worse yet, just repeat and repeat the same message yourself. So if you can’t be successful in creating content someone else hasn’t already created how can you create anything unique? The answer if you. You are the only you God created, and you are unique in the entire universe. So the only content that is truly unique, is content of your very own, content from your own life, your learning, and of course your own experiences (because they are always different than someone else). And that is what I intend to continue to do here on this site. Create unique original content from what I call life.

If you have a blog, send it my way, I love to read blogs that are personal, unique, and provide some type of value to the world by self expression in life.

A New Website About to Launch at Cornerstone Church

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It is not to much of a surprise (outside of the actual look) that Cornerstone is about to launch a new website. I had the privilege of working with Brad Ruggles, a website/graphics designer and creative developer, on the launch of this new site. Two of my three earthly passions are faith, technology, and photography, which means I was pretty much able to combine all three into one project.

This project was something that took a few months to put together, and was the collaborative effort of every staff member at Cornerstone, but it was something I have wanted to work on for many years now. Not just a new website, but a new mindset into what potential the Internet has in the Church body.

Tools like Twitter, Facebook, rss feeds, podcasts, videos, and all the things that make up the Internet today can be utilized for kingdom purposes, and done in a professional way. This isn’t a new subject for me personally (see The Church’s New Drug of Choice // Part 1, Does a Church Really Need a Website?, The Church Body and the Internet, Part 1, The Church Body and the Internet, Part 2, to name a few past posts), I have been on a quiet campaign for relavant church websites for the better part of 10-15 years.

This is (to me) what people expect out of their church today, and especially those Believers and visitors in the 19-29 age range. It is a connected world, a connected society, and they don’t want or expect to walk into a church today and see 20th century technology. We don’t need to or have to spruce up Jesus. The Salvation message has remained the same for 2,000 years, but each church in the Church body reaches different people according to its purpose, and a website is a great place to start.

I say start because a website, a well designed, relavant, media based website, is where you can start to bring people to the Church and where they can learn and connect with others that have a love for Christ. It is no longer about displaying something static that shows the worship times and directions, it is about how do we connect with each other and grow in the Body. I can’t wait for the new site to go live. I think this is exactly what Cornerstone is to me and my wife when we arrived about a year ago and I was thrilled to have some part in putting it together.

I know there are a few other Church IT people that read my blog so I will be writing some additional posts on how it went together and how to even get started. What to look out for when choosing a website design company, and what you should be able to expect from your developer. I think we chose one of the best in Ruggles but throughout the course of the project I did meet several other companies, some good, and some very bad, and hope to share that with you in the upcoming months. Hope you enjoy the new site, it should be live some time this weekend.

Lake City Colorado Wide-Angle Water Landscape

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One of the things I probably dis-like the most about blogs is having to clean house, but, this weekend I went through the tedious process of implementing a new design, updating all the categories for each post, and changing some previous posts to display the full size images this design will accommodate. I really think that much of the details in photography is lost in viewing small images, so, for those still on dial-up, I apologize now. From this point forward I will be displaying my images on up to 900px wide in some cases, like the image below of Lake City lake in Colorado (although I will try to keep the file size as small as possible).

The image above was taken in August of 2005 in Lake City Colorado. There is an overlook on the forest road where you can stop and hike up the side of the mountain. Image data: Camera, Nikon D2X, ISO-100, Focal length 35mm @ f/16

This is one of those scenes that has probably been photographed a million times but is still so beautiful that you just have to stop and take a shot. This particular shot I did do a bit of hiking off the main road. I climbed up to the top of the ridge overlooking the lake and the most gorgeous colors appeared.

I rarely think the best shot is in the foot pegs of the tripod that just left (or where everyone else tends to take the same shot), and in this case I was greatly rewarded. The drive from Creede to Lake City is one of the most wonderful drives found in the country, so if you ever have a chance, take the road right out of Creede and take a slow drive over several passes until you drop down into Lake City.

Happy Labor Day to everyone.

Learning New CSS Stylesheets, Themes, and Design Code

Learning to Use a Stylesheet and PHP

Over time I have had to learn how to use a CSS or Stylesheet and some basic PHP. As I have leaned more and more code I have found a bit of freedom to be able to change and adjust things to be exactly the way I want them to be, and in the process be able to mess things up as well. I would really recommend learning as much code as you possibly can, over time, it will be invalueble to you since everything runs on code.

Scott Fillmer

Life in Faith & Photos