www.reflectingthedesigner.com

I’ve finally gotten around to posting another free theme! This one is a theme I just did for someone, so it’s WP 3.0 compliant. The image below is a screen shot of the working theme, and has the following features:

• Two Column Design
• One Column Page Template also included as a check box option for each page.
• Sidebars include right sidebar, top sidebar, bottom sidebar, and dynamically widgetized footer
• Valid XTML
• Horizontal Menu (works great with new customizable menu found in WP)
• Vertical Menu also available if desired within the theme
• Built in Social Icons
• Built in div for Header Logo or Graphic

Let me show you what you’ll need to know in order to download this theme and edit the Header and personalize your social icons. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve followed some of my posts about how to edit the code of Artisteer generated templates, you might be freaking out a little that the updated version is so much different. Don’t worry. Artisteer has actually made things a little easier for you. Let me show you how. Read the rest of this entry »

Even though it’s been around a long time, I have just started messing around with an iGoogle page, and I LOVE it! Read the rest of this entry »

I’m loving the newest version of WordPress and the newest Artisteer upgrade as well that perfectly meshes with WordPress! The new features that I especially like are the new Menu options as well as the new Featured Image option. Read the rest of this entry »

As I was working on redesigning theStock411 WordPress blog, I implemented two fantastic WordPress plugins. One of these plugins is WP-Sticky. I’ve known about this plugin for a while, but had never used it. It’s a nice simple way to keep one post at the top of your blog at all times. Now, there are a couple of items to note if you are using this plugin after creating your theme in Artisteer: You must change a tiny bit of php if you want to hide the date. I found a couple of forums that had parts of the following information:

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I so enjoyed working with Annie from Annie Kennedy Photography as we helped to give her a presence as she starts her new business venture.

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I was just browsing through some new twitter followers blogs, and I couldn’t help but notice some well designed themes, and some very poorly designed WordPress and Blogger themes. Most of these have great content, but a lot don’t really make you want to stay on their site very long because they are either not friendly on the eyes or they are difficult to navigate through.

Here are some simple tips to help you make your blog or site keep more viewers. (Note: not all of these tips are even used on my own site, but should be.

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Well, as you can see if you’ve visited my site before, I’ve just updated the theme again. I like to create new design themes for my own site both for variety as well as to demonstrate some nice Artisteer, Photoshop, and WP tweaking techniques. I’ll list a few of those techniques in this post.

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Here is another Christmas card that was a “spur-of-the-moment” job. I’m posting this one to demonstrate a few simple Photoshop tips that can help you turn around designs quicker for customers just like this one. As the title suggests, there is great advantage in using many layers in Photoshop. I’m just going to focus on the background of this card itself. There are 3 separate layers used just for the green background.

The bottom layer is actually a black and white plaid I found online and turned into a pattern. Need a refresher on creating your own patterns? (NOTE: if you are using Artisteer and want to know how you can make your own textures, this is it!) Read the rest of this entry »

This was another Christmas card I just did for a family who wanted a very customized look. They also needed a few different versions of the same card for their business, close family and friends, and others on their Christmas card list.

The image to the right is the family version, but you can view their business version in my gallery.

This is what they requested: Read the rest of this entry »