Moving and Improving

Attention followers of our blog, we moved!

On Friday September 11th we had an opportunity to finally start transitioning away from the old single page site and allow WordPress to do all of the heavy lifting from now on. Or at least until something flashier and faster comes along to replace it.

There is sort of a strange paradigm in web development and design, you have time to work for everyone accept yourself. This issue often causes company websites to sort of languish in a mire of never progressive soup. Great examples of people who don’t upgrade and don’t really care are cameronmoll and happycog. Both represent amazing minds in the web community and neither one has really changed the theme of their websites in well over 3 years.

This constant self-deprecation can be a sweet kiss of death for many companies. I can personally attest to my constant busy-ness as being the primary cause for my lack of change to the core site. I sincerely wish that I had more time to develop the ideas that have to a slightly more inviting polish. But perhaps my recent move from spineless entrepreneur to full-time web wrangler will grant me some real time to brush my site up.

The other part of the web that is always chasing me is the feeling that my best work is done for clients and not for me. It always feels like my concepts for other people are more well rounded than what I end up assembling for myself. I know that I have a hundred good ideas a day but they are always for others. Perhaps it is my future to be a muse for others and never for myself.

Thank you all for coming by and reading my white noise from time to time.

Launching 2 Sites

Just a quick announcement,

We recently finished production on 2 new websites. They are now launched and swimming in the wild.

Joynt Search Marketing – http://joyntsearchmarketing.com

Zach Meyer, website designer and co-owner of cognizant-design.com has finished a new design for joyntsearchmarketing.com. The new website design is focused on the concept of design following functionality. The design is clean and seamless. There is plenty of room to focus on the main attraction, which is the content. Many blog designs today are overcrowded and the designers are clearly trying to incorporate too much which ends up distracting the reader from the content.

With this design, the reader is guided through the content with minimal interruption. At the bottom, they are greeted with options to contact the blog owner and read additional posts. This frees the reader from having to scroll back to the top for additional information. Beautiful font selections, and complimentary colors help make the site esthetically pleasing and warm.

10 Thousand Things – http://10kthings.com

Developed on WordPress, this design and layout was designed to include a mini form in the column as well as a home page that would serve up decent CTAs that can be managed by the client. Dave Winget is another member of the extended Cog family and has a lot to offer in the ways of full featured web marketing services. He has a great library of resources, including us , that he calls upon from project to project. He has a great blog too.

Stop Crying You Babies

If any of you know who I am and what I usually say, I try to maintain some decent levels of class and sophistication while expressing my opinion or view about a particular subject because I know what backlash is, however, today I will allow myself to be rather unrestrained. Today I shall be attacking the loud voice of supposed web designers who are bitching about the difficulties of designing for Drupal or any other CMS that exists. This is the movement of the future

Things to know about me, I am not the God’s gift to webdesign, I am not a PHP developer by trade, I do not claim to be the last word in any of the advances to technology, but I have been using these CMS platforms for about 4 years and I think I have a reasonable idea about what is possible and how you let the medium be your guide when working in web. Plus after I am done bitching I will attach some resources for you.

I have been designing and developing in the web for quite some time now and I don’t think that there is any reason for anyone who wants to start, or has started, to ever wince at the thought of using the tools that are available to them. Having been in the middle of several debates and pushes to change the standards for various parts of Drupal, I have heard this unified cry from the “designers” that PHP is scary and that they should have to worry about it. STFUYFB! I started out with the chicken-shit designer method of copying pasting and re-wrapping existing code in divs to get it to my bidding, and it worked. My level of impact was really low at that time but then I began to copy functions and edit them to get the results that I wanted. From that moment on the dynamics of what I was doing changed. There was no longer a fear that the white screen would kill all my work.

Of course you won’t know everything to start with. But you can go about learning these things in a way that is tailored to your style. I like videos and hands on tutorial instruction. The more I physically perform an action the more I connect that action with its purpose. Some of my friends just read through the books and they totally get how to accomplish these things. Different strokes for different folks. But saying that you can’t understand or learn something means that either you are incompetent or you refuse to allow yourself to learn.

Ugly Garland is no longer an excuse, bitches! Every CMS starts with the ugliest pre-installed theme that could be possibly packaged with it for 2 reasons; 1. This is what the developers were using while developing and or 2. The developers didn’t have a designer to create a decent starter theme with. All complaints about Drupal’s boxiness to me is white noise. As designers, we (you and I) have the power to create something that can be free and airy or cramped and claustrophobic. Your art style, be it minimalist or texture crazy, can work in any arena. Our responsibility is to create something that fits the purpose and medium it will be presented in.

If you design for print, you need to know what can be accomplished and how to use the press/paper/inks/etc to accomplish it. Know your tools or start learning about them so that you can create the results that you want. Don’t blame the medium for your lack of understanding. (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP are now the foundations for open source web-design and development. If you don’t have any concept of what these things are or even a vague idea of how they work together to create a website, then you either need to find out about it or STOP DESIGNING FOR THE WEB. You arrogant lazy assholes that keep saying how much you don’t like webdesign because its too restrictive, please stop bidding against me. You are using up my creative air and its really annoying.

Sure, there are many things that can become better and in the case of the open source world, it is the designers and developers that dictate that change. Voice your opinion and help create solutions. The web is full of bitching.

As for your growth here are some basic things to consider;

Design Resources: 960grid, webdesignledger, smashingmagazine, tutsplus, drupal, wordpress, alistapart, w3schools

If you are ready to take of that summer dress and get on board with the rest of us;

Development Resources: drupal api, wordpress codex, PHP

Best of luck.

Zach “attack”