Wordpress is working on a new theme for 2010, called “Twenty Ten”
The new theme supports a lot of built in options for customizing the banner, background, and typefaces. Kubrik was a great starting place for a lot of <= 2.8 themes, but with 2.9 and 3.0 coming out, it’s time to embrace the upgrade. Go Wordpress team!
I’d like to use the term “click affinity” in the world of web design – if it does not already exist. I just realized this concept when I visited the Wall Steet Journal’s online magazine site and was immediately tempted to click on many of the stories.
It was a difficult struggle as I had many other things I needed to be working on (ie: no time to visit that site) but there was still a pull to get into their content.
In addition to having good design and usability, the real core piece of being popular online is having good content, which is:
I believe having valuable content, content-teasers, graphics, and yes – even ads will increase that content’s “click affinity,” which will engage users.
Try to present good content! Raise the click affinity for the items on your website.
I’ve been thinking that I need to revamp the site again, maybe do a more custom template. I don’t really do any advertising here, nor do I plan to, so I’m thinking of going with a minimalistic theme that just highlights the content well.
Getting typography right is hard enough, even when you have all of the image editing tools to aid. But as we all know, many times images are blocked on e-mail clients, which makes the task of designing an effective e-postcard with high penetration difficult. Sweetwater has done an nice job mixing an e-mail promotion with a graceful fallback on a recent e-mail promotion. Take a look at the email below with and without images. I especially like the second heading which uses a -2px letter spacing css attribute to achieve a nice kerning.
The ad was available here when I posted this.
The second, more official launch of the BB&T Center for Capitalism at Wake Forest University was today
We tried launching the site for the first time back in August but there were too many revisions to make. It’s looking much better now.
Thought I’d post this here, too:
I wanted to share a facebook application I just learned about. It adds a tab to a facebook “page” that shows twitter updates:
It was difficult to find, I didn’t realize it was possible. For a long time I thought facebook only allowed you to push your FB updates to twitter, and not vice versa.
Hope you find it useful. They have a free and pro version. I’m using free.
Google is celebrating Newton’s Birthday today with a poppy javasript falling apple. Google recently added javascript to their homepage with the fade in / fade out of the text around the edges. Google usually adds cool graphics for holiday’s like Issac Newton’s Birthday but they have decided “what the heck,” we are already using javascript on the homepage, let’s add something else. I think it’s kind of delightfully tacky.
