I spotted this one while driving around the other day and had to snap a picture with my cell phone. The client basically blew the logo up and put it on the side of a truck. That “W” could use some major kerning, but otherwise it’s pretty cool stuff.
We’ve been nominated by John Carlsen for the Syncopated Systems 2008 Greater Austin Web Developer of the Year™ – or GAWDY™ – award. Exciting stuff.
More information from the contest rules page:
Syncopated’s goal in offering the Greater Austin Web Developer of the Year™ – or GAWDY™ – award is to increase awareness of and compliance with industrial standards while recognizing, promoting, and fostering collaboration with and friendly competition between local Web site developers.
This peer-reviewed competition will greatly benefit potential clients of Web site developers by recognizing only quality practitioners, which today comprise only about 10% of commercial developers.
Let me dust off the cobwebs and introduce you to the latest iteration of The 9513, our beloved country music blog and main culprit responsible for consuming copious amounts of our time and thus the shadow of negligence cast over this very blog. After a full year in existence and growing popularity we thought it was time to roll out a design to liven things up a bit and better feature out best content.
As you can see from the screenshot, we redesigned the homepage to feature 4-5 articles of our choosing in the left hand side bar with a longer list of most recently posted articles in the middle column. The right hand sidebar contains a rotating feature space that allows us to highlight content at the top of the page where it’s more likely to be seen than if it were shoved further down the page. Score one for the publishers and the readers.
We’ve received quite a bit of positive feedback so far, but hope to continue adding important, community-building features over the coming months.
Visit: http://www.the9513.com
After launching the redesign of this website a couple of weeks ago, we’ve gotten a few questions about how we configured WordPress to make the site work the way it does. This blog gives me the perfect opportunity to answer those questions and perhaps contribute a little back to the community.
A little background: We launched our first site rather hastily last year with the intentions of updating it as time went on. Unfortunately, it was fairly static and I was the only one able to update it. Considering how busy I was, the site became stagnant and outdated. During the redesign process, we decided that a CMS would be beneficial to keep the site from reaching that point again. I looked into multiple open source solutions, but found most of them were overkill for our needs. We decided to stick with something that we were familiar with: WordPress.
WordPress is developed as a blogging platform, but it contains functionality for writing pages outside of the blog hierarchy and an extensive API that makes writing plugins to easily extend the functionality quite simple. We only wanted a few pages to let prospective clients know what we do and give them the ability to contact us. We also wanted a blog for various reasons, namely to keep content fresh, to develop a quality inbound link structure by writing (hopefully) quality content, to release goodies that might be beneficial to the community that we’ve relied on to learn so much about our profession, and to make new contacts.
The rest of this post will deal specifically with the way WordPress is configured to run the Blazer Six website. Just as a quick summary, the following will detail how to install WordPress in a subdirectory other than the root, but still have it accessible from the root and we will also set up a faux directory structure to make your blog appear to be a separate entity from the website. You will need at least version 2.1 of WordPress to follow this guide.
WordPress likes to store quite a few files in the root directory and along with the default files that typically go in the root (.htaccess, favicon.ico, robots.txt, Google and Yahoo authorization files, etc.), it can get cluttered fairly quickly. Fortunately, it’s trivial to install WordPress in a subdirectory and make your site or blog accessible from the root.
I put my WordPress install in a subdirectory named /wordpress/, but if you look at all of the URLs on this site, none of them will contain /wordpress/, with one exception: files uploaded through the WordPress administration interface will have /wordpress/ in the URL. Other than that, your visitors shouldn’t be able to tell where your install resides and you get to keep your root directory clutter free.
Setting up pages should be the next step. If you’ll notice, we only have four pages here on Blazer Six (Home, Company, Our Work, and Contact). The page that will serve as the home page is the one we want to focus on. Go ahead and create a new page and give it whatever title you’d like and save it. We’ll cover how to set it up as the home page in a later step.
Some astute readers may wonder how I got the blog to appear to be served from the /blog/ subdirectory. This step is optional, but if you’d like for your blog to appear to be separate from your site, then go ahead and follow these steps.
When you configure your permalinks, choose the “Custom structure” option, then prepend /blog to your typical permalink structure. For example, I used /blog/%postname%/. All of your permalinks will now be prepended with /blog and make it appear that your blog is a separate entity from the rest of your site. A /blog/ directory doesn’t actually exist anywhere on my server, though.
If you’ve been following along, browse to www.yourdomain.com/blog/. You will notice that a 404 error is returned. The problem is that WordPress doesn’t know what to return for this URL. To remedy this, you will need to create a new page called Blog with a page slug of “blog”. If you were to browse to www.yourdomain.com/blog/ now, you’d get a blank page. WordPress still doesn’t know that you want to use this as the posts page.
Go to the Options panel, then go to the Reading subpanel. You will want the front page to display a static page, so go ahead and choose that radio button under the Front Page heading. 
For the front page dropdown, select the home page you created earlier. Now for the posts page option, go ahead and select the blog page you created earlier. That’s it. You should now have a functioning WordPress installation with the core files in a subdirectory, a custom home page, and a blog that appears to be separate from your main site, all easily managed from a single WordPress backend.
If you know a better way to accomplish these goals with WordPress or if you have a different solution for using WordPress as a CMS, I’d be interested in hearing them. Leave a comment and let me know.
A few days ago when I was driving out of Brady’s neighborhood this yard sign immediately caught my attention. It was stuck in the ground in a lot where the foundation of a future home was being worked on. The reason it caught my attention was because I designed it! Since I generally work on the web it’s always cool to randomly spot something I designed in the wild.
As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve made quite a few changes here at Blazer Six. Beyond cosmetic updates, we added a blog powered by WordPress which will allow us to update with news much easier, and therefore more frequently than before. When projects get updated in the Our Work section they’ll also be added to the blog, so if you subscribe to our RSS feed (at the top) you’ll receive updates with our most recent work.
Our goals have also changed to focus mainly on websites and blogs instead of trying to provide the whole shebang. We’ll still provide print design to clients who need it, but it’s not one of our main offerings. Over time we’ve found that we enjoy customizing WordPress to accommodate our client’s needs, and our clients seemed to be pleased that they can easily update their own sites.
Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about the new design.
After seeing the work we did to redesign Technosight, Vinny came to us looking for a similar approach to his personal blog. The idea was to take his simple two column blog and expand it so that more content was exposed while highlighting recent activity and popular blog posts.
We accomplished the task by making the most recent entry on the blog the only full post, followed by four truncated posts, and a list of the most recent posts after that in the archives. We split the sidebar into two separate columns to highlight more content near the top. Each section header is collapsible to allow visitors the ability to view only the content that they feel is important to them.
Visit: www.vinnylingham.com
Before redesigning Technosight Ken Yarmosh had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do, in his blog he writes “I believe it is necessary to challenge traditionally accepted blog layouts.” He wanted to appeal to the less technically savvy visitors of his site. So he set about creating his wireframes and sent us a detailed account of what he was looking for.
After a couple of concepts and a few rounds of revisions we came to the design that he currently sports on Technosight. Ken said “I started off this effort by sending them a very detailed wireframe that they definitely improved upon during the design and development process. I’ve worked with Blazer Six for just under two years now - on my own projects and as a partner on others - and they continue to deliver.”
Visit: www.technosight.com
Your Income at risk is a website warning people about the perils of going without disability insurance while educating visitors on how and what kind of disability insurance they should be looking for. We worked with Robert Zirkelbach to fine tune the design to help accomplish their goals. Robert lauded us on our flexibility to accommodate their needs while remaining accessible. There’s no bureaucratic structure at Blazer Six that you have to go through, and we like to build ongoing relationships with our clients. We think it makes the whole process easier.
Visit: www.yourincomeatrisk.org
BNI is an organization, founded by Dr. Ivan Misner, with over 90,000 members that is based on helping businesses network and gain new business through referrals, so then, how coincidental is it that Dr. Ivan Misner came to us by way of a referral. Dr. Misner is the author of multiple books on the subject of business networking and when he decided to start a podcast to share his wealth of knowledge, we stepped up to provide our services. The site needed to match BNI’s corporate brand, but provide an updated look and feel. We were able to take these requirements and create a professional blog design that did exactly what Dr. Misner was looking for. New podcasts are posted once a week in which nuggets of information and insight are shared by Dr. Misner.
Visit: www.bnipodcast.com
"I cannot thank the guys over at Blazer Six enough! They have done an excellent redesign which will expose far more content and given me a far better use of space [...] Brady & Brody are a real professional duo - and I can honestly say I was not disappointed in the least!!"
Vinny Lingham - VinnyLingham.com
