The online shop will be up and running fully once I’ve got time to upload new t-shirts and art. RedBubble will handle all the manufacturing, payment and delivery. You’ll be able to buy shirts, hoodies, cards, posters and framed artwork. Plans are afoot to get lots of gorgeous products up there so stay tuned.

I hope the new design works better. I’ve added tags so it’s easier to find articles of interest. New posts will be going up more regularly as I’ve been a bit slow recently. If you find any glitches with this new design, please drop me a comment below so I can fix it.

The ease of use was important for non-techy types. Creating and editing galleries is as easy as creating a gallery, uploading your photo’s and copy pasting in a shortcode. You can tag your photo’s add captions, resize images and embed slideshows in the sidebars if you wish.

After researching other photography themes, I came to the conclusion that the photo’s should be the star, not the site graphics. I’ve kept things minimal and clean so the photography really stands out. I will be using this theme to re-design an existing clients site and hopefully other photographers will be interested in using it to show off their work and generate new business.

View the Demo

Roger’s recent books are a series of historical crime novels set in St Petersburg and featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment. He wanted to evoke something of the dark, harsh times in which the novels are set. He also wanted to be able to write his blog and have it as part of the site. It was really nice to have an open brief from a fellow creative, so I set about designing a custom WordPress site that would showcase his writing and allow him to blog.

Rogernmorris is the outcome of my labour. The custom WorkBase child theme I had designed a few months ago served as the backbone. I was able to create a site that fitted in with the themes in Roger’s books, while being easily updated and maintained by Roger himself. I walked him through the admin side, and in no time he was up and running.

I’d like to thank Roger for being such an easy going client and wish him the best of luck in his writing. You can find out more about his books on the website and buy them from Amazon.

Thanks also Rog for biggin me up to your publisher Faber. One of their new writers, Alex Preston, contacted me shortly after Roger’s site went live to ask me if I could do a similar job for him. His new book, “This Bleeding City” will be published by Faber early next year. I also designed his website and blog which you can visit here.

During my research I found some truly awesome writers sites, although these tended to be ‘big money’ authors who have already sold millions of books. I did struggled to find decent, well designed sites for lessor known writers though. It is a shame that people so talented with words and language seem to have to settle for sub standard visual design for their online presence, which has become such an important part of bringing their work to a larger audience.

Six Revisions states that the trend has recently been revived by designer Tim Van Damme. It has spawned some lovely studies in UI design, most of them using smooth, eyecatching jQuery effects. It got me thinking to an old project I had on the backburner for a long time. My first website was setup way back in 2003, I’ve been using it as a bit of a testing ground, and I never really got a proper homepage up I was happy with. This was the exact thing I needed to put up there.

Since colourform is my main site now, things have moved on, but people do still end up at my old domain. This way I can direct them to my latest projects, social networks and have another point of contact besides colourform. The simple, minimal design would therefore serve as a hub to my web presence.

I did my research, learned a bit about jQuery, and came up with a nice simple metallic theme. I’m pleased with how it turned out and had fun designing the icons and skin. The contact icons are actually from my NetBats font which is available as a free download from this site. Here’s the finished design:

Visit antoneycalvert.com to see it in action.

I myself had no idea what a ‘child theme’ was until I found an interesting article over at op111. I wanted to create a WordPress theme that appealed to creatives, individuals and small businesses (or even large ones), that was simple and easy on the eye. Instead of reinventing the wheel I figured I’d find an existing theme I liked and customise it.

Graph Paper Press had the exact theme I was after. It’s called Workaholic. So I signed up and downloaded the theme and got down to creating my own version. The result is a child theme – so called because it’s based on a parent theme (Workaholic in this case), which I’ve called WorkBase.

As you can see it’s really clean and well laid out and even has Twitter integration. I changed the colour scheme, graphics and some core functionality of the original theme to make it, well, much better in my opinion. By far the best change I made was integrating SmoothGallery into the theme. This replaces the rather clunky image gallery that was included. SmoothGallery is a Flash-like image slideshow viewer. Using a plugin to integrate it into the theme meant I now had a fully user editable slideshow. I also improved some of the graphic elements and gave the whole theme a classy sheen.

To find out more about WorkBase, how to get the files, installation instructions and how I can design and install a custom version of the theme for your website, simply click the button below:

UPDATE: I’m in the process of updating WorkBase. As such it won’t be available to download until I know it’s solid. Click the button above to check out the demo.