Since this website has essentially been flushed of it’s design and now sits as a vanilla flavoured plugin-less blank canvas, I’ve decided that for 2010, allchorn.com is going to receive a complete redesign alongside all our corporate stationery. Starting with the cards.

Over the festive season, I’ll be translating the new look across the board. Our forms, questionnaires, quotes, invoices and this website will all take on a fresh new look. You can subscribe via RSS if you want to know when we go live.

I attended the KZN launch of Adobe’s new Creative Suite (CS4) today. Adobe always come out with great updates but I’ve never been the best at keeping on the latest latest versions. This time round, I must admit, I’m keen to get onto their latest offering as soon as possible.

They ran 3 talks. One on web, the other print and the last one on video. Covering new and improved  features in Dreamweaver, Fireworks (glad to see my old friend still in their stable, and improved), Flash (big improvements there), Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, After Effects, Premier and Soundbooth.

Mo from Adobe who spoke about the new web and video tools.

Skye who spoke about the new print tools.

Skye in the foreground and Mo by the lectern.

Mo showing off Soundbooth’s new editable audio file format.

Sky about to display Illustrator’s new abilities in isolating grouped elements to work on them without ungrouping.

People filtering out of the room at the end.

Please note: This is all meant in good humour, but it’s the gospel truth, so pay heed.

Really people. I know it’s exciting when you first start using the internet and you think:

“wow, imagine if there was a web site where people could list their company, and I could charge them to list, and I can target every industry and niche and small mom and pop side cafe in the known universe, and I’ll be RICH beyond all my wildest dreams!… muwahahahaha!”

Do you think you’re the first person to consider this?

Do you think that with the nature of the internet being such that you can create web pages in freely downloadable software packages, upload it to low cost, or even free web hosting provider’s servers using more free software and even integrate a database into the site with even more free software and technology… nobody has thought of this before? Surely not!

Sorry, someone has thought of it… and quite a few people at that, and over quite a few years, and some have poured millions of $ into the idea!

Take for instance the most obvious example. The Yellow Pages. A few years back, it was pretty badly made in this country, and me being in the business of developing websites often heard this justification of building their silver bullet website to compete with them. Even then I politely declined.

Here are some excepts from real emails to some of these enquirers:

“…to be perfectly honest, I am not entirely certain as to the viability of the job in question. I think the job is going to cost more than it’s going to be worth as the system (while inventive) is too close to many, many other web directories. I just think the market is too flooded.”

“…I pride myself in my ethics and honesty in business. As such, I feel it is my obligation to decline the offer to carry this project out for you but I do wish you the best of luck…”

I can also state that the projects those emails related to were passed onto other web companies who eventually abandoned them or are still trying to develop the system years later and are still not close to what you’ll find on the yellow pages or something like dmoz.org.

The Web Directory’s Saving Grace – Niches

The one place I’ll gladly admit a web directory to being a worthy addition to the internet is when it is niche related and only focuses on a certain industry or topic.

Take for instance, a directory about motorycles. Listing shops, tyre fitment centres, battery suppliers, leather, gloves, boots, helmets, accessories, spare parts etc. Now that is a legitimate an useful service to the web browser and one I’d readily bookmark if it’s content was up to date and reliable.

Keeping a directory up to date can constitute immense admin labour. Especially if it grows to a size that will actually be making money for you to buy more than a 6 pack every quarter. Bare this in mind, and remember that time is money. Especially if it’s not your time…

Well, thats enough about that, and I guess I’ve got that sufficiently out of my system.

Why the new design? Well, aside from the fact that the old one was feeling, well, old to me is that I have changed my role a bit. Not so far as throwing out my job title, but rather revising how I do things, who I do them for, and when.

Why Have I Changed Focus?

Those who know me will be aware that things have been relatively successful since I started Allchorn Design in Feb 2004, but things in the website design industry are taking a bit of a turn at the moment. Or so it seems.

With an influx of amateurs, and the increase in quality of themes and “cookie cutter” solutions these days, people seem to be losing sight of uniqueness and the preservation of their specific identity online. With services like Blogger, WordPress.com, Hetzner’s Site Builder, Synthasite and the free website builders offered by some hosts, people are seemingly jumping on the band wagon and burning their fingers.

Something I’ve always remembered from when I was working in marketing and dealt with ad agencies is a saying that goes loosely as follows:

“Buying a bad designer a state of the art macintosh won’t make his designs any better.”

I believe the same rings true of these off the shelf offerings. If you bought me the most expensive guitar in the world, with a state of the art amplifier, I’d still reduce you to tears with my lack of musical skill. Set an aesthetically impaired individual free on a beautifully designed and crafted template, and you’ll have the web equivelant of my piece of music!

Well, this is why I’m shifting focus, but doesn’t tell you how. I’ve chosen to focus rather on smaller websites for small and medium sized companies and individuals. If a large company wants an elegant little website for some reason, sure thing. But indecisive committees, lengthy approval processes, and difficult “foodchain” communication is a thing of the past for me.

With the launch of Sitepress, I’m putting out an offer for anyone to afford a custom designed website integrated into a content management system and coded to perfection, according to web standards.

The New Look of Allchorn.com

Do you like it? Comment if you want. It’s a change for me and being a designer, I’m never “entirely” pleased with my own work. Especially the stuff I do for myself. It wasn’t a quick process. It’s something that has built up in my head, on paper and in little disposable mockup designs I’ve done in Fireworks over the last… well, ages!

The last leg of the final leap came from a desperate urge to get away from the Cutline theme created by Chris Pearson. Nice as it was, as I mentioned above, I don’t believe in using pre-made designs.

It All Started On Paper

I started the new design with my sketchbook, a 4B pencil and my little blue eraser that never seems to rub out. The same 3 things you can see at the bottom right of this page actually. As you can see, it pretty much mirrors the layout I have now on the site.

Sidebar On The Left

I chose a left to right layout with my sidebar on the left to serve as a quick glance of who I am and whats on offer in brief. Going down it shows some more info on what is on this site in the form of a category listing, and the tag cloud to see whats most popular.

Catering For 1024px Users And Above

The main content area I have made as wide as possible without having people moving their heads reading like they’re watching tennis from the middle of the court. The over all width of the site is 960px which accommodates 1024px resolution using visitors and above.

Scalability, Better Than I Could Have Imagined

The site scales beautifully! Even better than I expected. Try enlarging it and everything elegantly moves out the way for whatever is before it.

Light Colour Pallette And Little To No Frills

The most noticable aspect of the design is it’s simplicity and light colour pallette. This is to shift focus onto the content. There is a big fat chunky navigation at the top, so if you want to see my portfolio, or read my rambling “about” page, you can do so at your leisure, but the meat of the site is in the main, wide right hand column… throughout the site.

Putting Things Into Fireworks And Fleshing It Out

Working from my sketch, I created my master template visual in Fireworks. I prefer working with a more vector based program and I am most familiar using this awesome design package. It came out exactly as I wanted, and the clouds, birds and the subtle blue gradient from the top finished off the header of the page.

Working my way down, I used the thick bar on top of, and thinner underneath to quite clearly differentiate the headings for the sections in the sidebar. A trait of Cutline that I quite liked.

Finally, the footer. I took my pencil, sketchpad, eraser trio and photographed them with my 17-55mm lense really close up on a low f stop to give it a shallow depth of field, and managed to slot that into the bottom right hand corner of the design.

The latest posts and comments section in the screenshot of the design are still to be added at the time of writing this post.

Taking It From Design Comp. To A WordPress Theme

Aaah, this is the part I truly enjoyed. It’s been a while since I got down and dirty with HTML and CSS. A touch of PHP was new to me, but it was all such basic stuff, I wouldn’t brag about it.

I followed Small Potato’s 16 step WordPress theming tutorial which I did in one sitting. It took me about 5hrs and after it I feel I know a hell of a lot more than I did before about WordPress. It also had me delving into the WordPress codex shortly after to learn more about what the system can do.

Cutting images out of my design was simple. Just the logo, clouds, top gradient and the footer image were needed. Nothing complex, no strict measuring of bits and pieces. Just the valid XHTML accompanying a Stylesheet that tells everything where to be and how to look.

Typography, Keeping Things Simple

With the myriad of fonts available to use, why on earth would I stick to only two on my site? Well, Only one if you don’t count my logo which uses Trebuchet MS as an image. Thats right, only one font on this entire site; Arial.

The reasons for this are as follows:

1. Firstly, Arial is very easy to read on a screen. Usability studies have shown that Arial and Verdana are some of the most readable on-screen fonts.
2. I am a big fan of Helvetica (they even made a movie about the font), and Arial is Microsoft’s Helvetica, I thought I’d use something I prefer the look over most other type faces.
3. You are limited to the fonts you can use on a website, and Arial is one of the most widely installed fonts on computers. It’s been a standard font on Windows machines since 1992.

Well, thats about that… for now. I will add the other two blocks in under the posts soon, but there isn’t a desparate rush.