And this dynamic is not uncommon: we (designers) often focus on visually creative and user-centred interfaces, while they (developers) are more logical, systematic and technically oriented—and very often—much more direct. A recipe for tension.

We all have the same goal

I started my career more than 20 years ago – a designer turned developer turned UX engineer. I am usually the person who bridges the gap between business stakeholders and project managers on one side, and design and development teams on the other. I think of myself as a designer primarily, but one who understands developers and their struggles too.

Despite our differences, there’s one thing that we share in common: we all aim to create the best possible product/website.

But understanding that we share common objectives is just the first step. The real challenge lies in how we communicate to achieve these goals. Today in a world that’s more than ever online and remote, we tend to use channels that don’t attend to one important thing – emotions. That’s why—while I love async communication—it’s crucial to communicate as openly as possible and as fast as possible.

But speaking completely open and being fully transparent – that’s not in our nature, that’s not something you’re born with – you need to learn it, especially in work environments.

Personally, the best approach for making great products is to foster transparent communication – either through Slack channels (or other tools you might be using), or through ad-hoc video calls or screencasts. But remember even if you “fix a misunderstanding” in a video call – write it down in proper channels for everyone to see.

One project particularly highlighted the importance of communication for me. A designer created a beautiful UI, but the developers were struggling with the implementation due to the lack of technical specifications. After an honest conversation, the designer realised they didn’t know how to bridge the technical gap, but we made it happen by promoting transparent communication and making extra efforts to help developers understand the designs. Eventually, we shifted to regular design-development syncs, which prevented these issues in future projects.

Is there a problem in your project? Let’s try to work it out. Video call is not about talking about the problem – it’s about expressing emotions too.

And this is important because our body language can also share our fear or our enthusiasm, and let me tell you – this approach saved us sometimes hundreds of hours of both design and development time.

Psychological safety

As people we are all different – we have our fears, our thoughts about everything (including why a project is going in the wrong direction), our dreams – and we need to be able to speak openly about it.

We need to feel safe to share our thoughts.

For teams to communicate openly, they need to feel psychologically safe—where they can share ideas without fear of judgement or repercussions. This concept, known as psychological safety, is key to fostering innovation and collaboration.

In my experience, fostering psychological safety can truly transform a team. On one project, a junior developer was hesitant to voice concerns about a design. When I encouraged open feedback, he pointed out a potential database performance issue the rest of us missed.

His input led us to rethink the design early, making small but vital changes, saving us days of future rework.

Fostering transparency and open discussions

So, now that you have your safe space – transparency can flourish. Open dialogue allows both the creative and logical minds to collaborate effectively. This will boost creativity and promote innovation. Have a problem you can’t solve? Jump on a group call and discuss it with everyone who wants to participate. See if someone can suggest a workaround, a different approach and then discuss and test it. You will be surprised with the result.

This will also foster team learning – you will learn from both your successes and mistakes that you will share openly with others. And don’t be afraid to do so – by being open to learn from your own actions is a path towards becoming a better person and a better work buddy.

In the end, if we feel encouraged about sharing our thoughts, this might prevent burnouts and will definitely reduce stress levels – something that every good manager will welcome with open hands.

Although the term psychological safety was first used in a original research by Amy Edmondson, Google also did it’s own research called Project Aristotle where they found out that teams that embrace psychological safety are more successful, and the ability for team members to feel safe when expressing their ideas without fear of judgement – was the most important factor.

There are problems too

But does full transparency come at a cost? Prolonged discussions can drag projects, making decision-making slower. 

There’s a simple solution though and it’s called structured decision-making. Having a clear leader (this might be a different person depending on your project type) allows teams to stay on track while encouraging open dialogue.

Remember, time is our most valuable asset. If you try to fix a problem by talking and talking for days or even weeks, it will make you forget the problem you started with in the first place. Whatever you do – you need to do it fast. Define a problem, come up with different solutions/approaches, discuss them on a (preferably video) call and make a decision.

If it needs to be amended by a senior, – you do it now rather than later. And don’t forget to inform everyone on the team about the decision.

In the end

In the end, it’s not just about the tools we use but about creating a culture of trust and transparency. It’s about the lessons learned from real-world collaboration. From that one project where we finally bridged the communication gap, to those when a junior developer was free to express their thoughts – I’ve seen firsthand how fostering trust and transparency unlocks creativity and success.

As you embark on your next project, remember that fostering psychological safety and open communication isn’t just good for collaboration—it’s the key to creating something truly great.

As a company – create safe space. Use async communication to promote transparency and quick calls to resolve conflicts. Have one decision maker who will ultimately listen to all the ideas and decide on the path forward, but make sure this person is the one who will foster open communication that will generate numerous ideas and different possible outcomes. 

And that’s the recipe to making remarkable products.

…

Featured photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash

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But now that I’m 43 I love what I do, but I love my life more. When you work you basically exchange your free time for money, and now that I’m older I value my time much more than when I was 27. 

Having three kids, I need to prioritise them rather than my work. Don’t get me wrong – when I do work I’m 100% focused on what I’m doing, and I still have the same spark when working. Though, when the clock hits 3:30PM I sign off for the day as my calendar reminds me it’s family time. 

Even today, sometimes I work in the evening or during weekends, but way less than I used to. And I’m totally happy with it. I focus on delivering the best work I can — based on years of experience — in the least time I can. I work less and charge more as I’m doing things much faster than I used to. 

The question remains – is there such a thing as a perfect work-life balance?  And to answer that I’ll start by sharing two videos I recently viewed. Both are from renowned author and speaker Simon Sinek. In the first one he was speaking with Trevor Noah about friendship and loneliness. 

After watching it I started exploring other videos by Sinek and the one where he talks about work-life balance really caught my attention. He gave a really good example about it too. In there he says “let’s say it’s 4 pm, so basically part of the work day and you want to go for a run – you go for a run”. 

Sinek’s perspective on work-life balance as fluid rather than fixed resonates deeply with me. His views reminded me of my own experience running a small agency with my brother in the early 2010s, where we valued the same fluidity in work and life.  These — almost the same words — were part of our own handbook. In it we said: “We don’t care how much you work as long as the work gets done. Let’s say it’s a beautiful day outside and you want to spend it in the park – you go outside and spend it in the park. Work is not the most important thing in the world!”

As long as the work is done, go outside, live your life. This fluidity is crucial — because it gives you the freedom to prioritise happiness and fulfilment over rigid schedules.

To me, “work-life balance” is a myth. It’s not about neatly dividing time between work and personal life — it’s about life balance. Am I happy with my life? That’s the only question that matters. If the answer is no – I’m going to take action and change it. Life is too short to not live it to its fullest.

While I was working on bigger projects for the last couple of years, I got the time to trek Annapurna Circuit, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, learn to kite-surf, and spent numerous days on the hikes – all while getting the work done. I travelled with my children and watched them grow and explore the world around us – sometimes during my work day. And this is perfectly fine – if you deliver value, nobody should expect anything more from you.

It wasn’t always easy to carve out time for these experiences while managing large projects. But these moments of exploration didn’t just enrich my personal life — they made me a better, more creative, and focused professional. The insights and inner peace I gained while trekking through Himalayas or kite-surfing directly contribute to my work, allowing me to approach challenges with a clearer mind.

If you’re not happy with your balance, ask yourself: What small changes can I make today? Start with them. Can you reclaim an hour in your day to focus on something that truly matters — be it family, personal passion, or self-care? These moments will ultimately shape your happiness and your success.

We are all guardians of our own happiness, and no one will take action for us.

In the end, it’s not about finding the perfect formula for work-life balance. It’s not about the hours we work — it’s about how we fill our lives with meaning, joy, and connection. Work will always be there, but it’s the overall harmony and happiness of our lives that we’ll reflect on when all is said and done.

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In business, if you’re surrounded by people that don’t push you beyond your limits, you’ll soon realise you won’t be able to reach your full potential. While some may be content with this, and I respect their choice, it’s simply not an option for me. Life is too damn short to just live it as a bystander, working on everyday tasks, without the possibility to improve myself and grow. I believe in always striving to reach my fullest potential.

The time when I was young and inexperienced

Nearly two decades ago, I worked on a small project that had the potential to grow into something much bigger and long-lasting. I was reasonably happy with the design I delivered, but the reality was that it wasn’t my best work, and my involvement in the project came to an abrupt end. Curious about what went wrong, I asked the client for feedback. He told me bluntly, “You had all the tools, they were available for you to use, but you chose not to. That’s why we won’t be working with you. You’re not a good fit.”

And while his words felt harsh, they were true—and deeply eye-opening. At that time, I was young and inexperienced, but I realised he was right. I could have done much better, but I didn’t. Why? Because I hadn’t been pushed hard enough by the people around me. It wasn’t until that moment that I understood the difference a little extra effort could make.

I grew up in a small town so I didn’t need to push myself hard. Life could have been easy, but I wanted more. I had the desire to one day be the person who not only pushed myself but also inspired and mentored others to reach their full potential.

Since that experience, I began pushing myself harder while continually seeking improvement. I studied the top designers, observing not just what they did, but how they did it, and applied those lessons to my own small projects. Over time, this approach led me to take on larger projects, and as my knowledge grew, I found opportunities to share what I had learned with others. I started attending conferences, applying the insights I discovered there, and gradually, continuing to push myself and those around me toward reaching our full potential.

Surround yourselves with the best people

And just as in business, the people we surround ourselves with in life can either limit us or help us break boundaries we impose on ourselves.

When we choose to stay around people who don’t challenge us, we miss out on seeing what life could be like if we removed the borders we’ve built. While these boundaries sometimes serve to protect us, they also limit our imagination—and with it, our possibilities.

Imagine a world where you never travel because no one around you has, or where you avoid trying something new and exciting simply because “you’re not supposed to.” To me, that’s a pretty sad world. When we limit ourselves, we limit our experiences—and that’s not what life should be about.

I see life as a book of experiences we live through. These experiences are what we pass on to our children, empowering them to chase their own dreams and live more fulfilling lives.

My oldest son dreams of visiting Japan, largely because we travelled extensively across Europe when he was young. For him, travelling feels as natural as going to the grocery store. When I was his age, I didn’t have such dreams—times were harder, and my country was in the midst of war. But even then, my parents pushed me to my limits, so now my kids can dream big too.

Everything is achievable if we believe it is.

The story of surrounding ourselves with people who are better than us is not just about pushing boundaries; it’s about creating something remarkable of our lives. By pushing ourselves, we show others that anyone can dream big. And maybe, that’s exactly what everyone needs.

…

Featured photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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In the past, during initial interviews for potential projects, I’ve focused on getting to know the clients while allowing them to get to know me. I ask a lot of questions and am always as transparent as possible. If I see that we don’t align on core values, I simply won’t move forward with the project.

In business, the “no bullshit mentality” is all about integrity, authenticity, and charting an ethical path toward long-term success. I work with clients who share my values. For that reason, I never work with political parties or agendas that I don’t align with. I avoid companies that promote addictive behaviours, such as those in the gambling industry, or those that exploit people’s vulnerabilities, like predatory lenders. Most importantly, I refuse to work with companies that promote or fail to sanction hate speech or similar harmful behaviours.

This might make my pool of clients smaller, but that’s a trade-off I’m more than willing to accept. In the end, it ensures that the work I do aligns with my values and leads to more meaningful, long-lasting partnerships. Beyond business, this approach brings fulfilment to my personal life as well, helping me stay true to who I am. It’s something I actively teach my kids, encouraging them to follow their own ethical path, be honest, and prioritise integrity in everything they do.

A “no bullshit mentality” in design is all about prioritising the user. Focusing on user-centric design, simplifying processes, and creating straightforward experiences should always be the goal. Using dark UX patterns to manipulate user behaviour not only risks damaging trust but also leads to user dissatisfaction—something no company can afford. Instead, aligning a company’s goals with the real needs of its users will always result in better long-term outcomes.

Accessibility should be at the core of any design process, ensuring that the final product is usable by everyone. Clean, minimalistic design tends to offer the most seamless experience, whereas excessive animations or visual clutter can overwhelm users. By focusing on inclusivity and simplicity, a design not only becomes more functional but also more enjoyable for the users it serves.

The “no bullshit mentality” is, to me, the way forward—not just in business, but in life. While other approaches may offer short-term gains, this mindset prioritises ethics, leading to more sustainable, long-term success for any business. Personally, I lead my life with the same values, striving to help people whenever I can—whether through donating, volunteering, or simply being my best self. In a world where authenticity is increasingly valued, adopting a “no bullshit mentality” isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s the key to thriving in the long run.

…

Featured photo by Ludde Lorentz on Unsplash

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A year went by and I was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. The rainy season started early so I had a tough time climbing up. It was late October, and I missed part of the climb due to heavy rainfall and a rockslide blocking our road. A day before our final push, we went over Baranco wall and the rain was pouring like anything I have seen before. I was soaking wet, as were all my clothes. It was the lowest point of my climb and I was almost ready to give up. Fortunately, my clothes eventually dried up enough for me to walk towards the last camp before the summit. We slept when we got there to have a summit push at midnight. After a night of walking we summited Mount Kilimanjaro and enjoyed the most beautiful sunrise I have ever seen in my life.

Whether you’re facing tough conditions in the mountains or challenges in business, the obstacles may make you question why you began in the first place. But just like each difficult step brings you closer to your goal, every challenge at work is an opportunity to grow stronger and more resilient.

In life just like in business – you should never give up. I know it’s tough sometimes. Your team is not working as you expect them to (keep in mind we are all humans with our ups and downs). Maybe you’re feeling under the weather and cannot give your 100% – be honest to yourself and your team and it will pay off. You might think that a task you’ve been given is an impossible one – but remember the engineers putting a man on the moon when they had to program everything using technology less advanced than what’s on our smartwatches today.

What I’m trying to say – anything is possible if we focus and believe in it. Yes, sometimes giving up is the option, but most of the times we thrive when we challenge ourselves, the greatest growth happens when we step outside our comfort zone.

I learned at my own pace, but perhaps you can do it faster and, in the process, make the world a better place.

I published this article originally on LinkedIn. If you don’t follow me there – you should.

I’m open to work. Have a business opportunity? Drop me an email and I’ll get back as soon as possible.

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We started to draw and we started sketching an aquarium. He draws himself standing close to it, an octopus, sea grass and a fish. But the fish was strange (without a tail and looked more like a circle) so I said to him “Luka, look, the fish is ok but I think you can draw it even better. Let’s try to draw it again so we can see if we can make it look even better.”

Anyways, Luka started to be unhappy with my answer and eventually started crying. I waited for him to calm down a bit, and then I usually ask him to sit in my lap. I started explaining him silently that his fish was good, but that there were some usual parts missing like a tail.

He was still watching me when I took a pencil and a paper and started to draw myself. I said – “Here is how you can draw it” – while I was doing it. Luka then said “I can’t do it” but I was more like “You should try it. Come on, try it.”.

He started to draw, unwillingly. But then he stopped again – “I don’t know how to draw a fish.”

Again, I took the paper and started laughing. “Let’s try to draw a silly fish”, I say, while I started drawing a fish that doesn’t look like a fish at all, but more like a circle. I drew very small lips, big eyes and small, almost invisible tail.

Luka was laughing by my side.

Then I drew a “dragon-fish”. A fish with the wings of a dragon and a dragon tail.

Luka took a pencil and started to draw again. I gave him a task to draw three silly fishes. He was drawing and drawing.

After a while, he showed me his drawing. He painted three silly fishes. I liked them. I said to him that I like them a lot. I said that I liked how creative he was.

In the end, I asked him if he was happy that he drew a fish and he said – “Yes, I’m very happy. Thank you for showing me how to draw a fish.”

And I answered: “I will always show you how to do anything. I know that sometimes it is hard and scary to do something for the first time. To try something new because new things can sure look scary in the beginning. But I’m always here for you to teach you how to do it, and to do it with you so it wouldn’t look scary.”

He gave the hardest hug in the world.

—

Featured photo by russn_fckr on Unsplash

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The atmosphere in the room was overwhelmed with emotion — the event has just finished, and Jenny was talking about how she felt and wanted to thank all of us for our help.

Ten minutes later I was sitting in the Communications room. Next to me was my father, and a few steps away — in a lazy bag — was Luka. He was watching one of his favourite cartoons on his iPad. It was the first time the two of us visited a conference, and it was WordCamp Europe, no less.

For one last time, I looked around the room and closed the door, knowing that this is it — for a while — my last WordCamp Europe as part of the organising team.

***

Leiden

My journey — as for a lot of other people in the organising team — started at the first WordCamp Europe in Leiden. I went to some design conferences before that (Fronteers or SmashingConf to name a few) but what I saw at WCEU was something I never experienced before.

I was part of the WordPress ecosystem for some time – my first WordPress website was built in 2005, and in 2008 I started developing more and more on top of it. Leiden was a logical choice, though it happened during some tough time for me — I was going through a rough divorce, Luka was born a year before, and a company I founded was going bankrupt. But Leiden was a light at the end of a dark tunnel. I learned about the vast WordPress community and finally find a place of belonging.

And that after party. I remember Marko Heijnen introducing Milan Ivanović to Lucijan and me, and a friendship was born — sort of a friendship that doesn’t have borders — since both Lucijan and me were part of the organising team this year in Milan’s home country of Serbia.

***

Vienna

In 2015 I co-organised the first Croatian WordCamp. Petya Raykovska — the lead organiser of WCEU back then — came to give a talk. When the conference was over, I remember us sitting at one of the boats docked in the port. We were drinking coffee when I said – “Let me know if you need a hand, I’d like to help if WCEU needs any help with communications”.

And so it started. I helped with a few articles that year (and am especially proud of the Community series articles). Also, I have been given an opportunity to structure the first Social Media team. We tweeted, posted on Facebook and Snapchat. It was a blast.

That first year as part of WCEU organising team, I was petrified and stressed as I left my comfort zone and went to unknown. Don’t get me wrong; I got quite a lot of experience by then — from managing a team and working with international clients to organising (or helping to organise) smaller and bigger events. But then it all comes to our impostor syndrome, something Sonja Leix talked about during that very WordCamp Europe. And that’s ok. We all battle our battles and if you’re part of the WCEU team you never really feel alone. You are surrounded with people that like to share their knowledge, people that are there for you when you need it and are open to giving you advice and even more important – some guidance.

Paris

But next year was knocking on our doors. Paolo Belcastro, who was leading the WCEU organising team in Paris, asked me to lead the Communications team. A team that had only two people a year before (Petya and myself) has grown to five people. And suddenly, I was surrounded by other team leads — people that I often watched and tried to learn from, and admired their work ethics. We were discussing strategy, paving grounds for what WordCamp Europe has become in the past two years — one of the most important European technology events, a conference with a global reach, if you will.

The second year I was even more afraid. Being in a position where I should lead felt uncomfortable at times. For the first few weeks, I was asking myself a question “Are you doing everything you can?” and wondering “Am I good enough for the position?“. – because I felt like I’m not good enough and that I was there by accident.

But I found a way to cope with it. For starters, I was thinking a lot, examining everything that was happening inside my head. The biggest problem I faced was the fact that I wasn’t a native English speaker and was leading the Communications team.

But then it got me – if I wasn’t good enough, (a) I wouldn’t be asked to lead, and (b) If I did something wrong there will be some autocorrection within the team, someone who will tell me to improve and make things better.

You know, to me WordCamp Europe is like a big family where we all take care of each other.

***

What we leave behind

Every one of these three years I enjoyed the experience of being on the team, learning and improving the process. I appreciate the work I did, but even more, I appreciate the work others in my team did as this is not a “one man show”.

Today, when I look back, I see the immense work past organisers did to get us where we are now. I was blessed for the opportunity to be on the team for three consecutive years, to see WordCamp Europe transform to what happened in Belgrade – a conference people don’t believe is organised by a group of volunteers from all over Europe.

This is an experience that can change you in a very positive way. You are doing something for the community, working with extraordinary people. You have a sense of belonging. And in the end you see happy faces from the attendees, speakers, sponsors, volunteers… you know you did a good job.

I left the room and closed the door, but the 2019 team is looking for organisers, and you should join!

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How WordPress changed the face of Croatian politics

When I applied to talk at WordCamp Belfast, I applied with the same talk as in Kyiv and with another one, rather old, but inspirational. This was the talk about our project that we’re working with the city of Rijeka. Although working on it for quite some time now, and the constant feeling that we’re not moving fast enough, I believe I showed people the progress we’re making.

On previous WordCamps, I talked about this topic too, but this time I had much more interesting talks and observations/comments after the talk was actually over. Living in countries like the United Kingdom or Ireland gives you a different perspective on things you consider to be normal, but are not normal in developing countries like Croatia. Starting with budgets (which are much lower in Croatia), and ending with less educated clients that are demanding the same quality as their UK’s counterparts.

It was interesting to hear people talk about our job on the project and the way we’re trying to change things in Croatia. A year has passed since we started to work on it, and it felt it will be long over by now. Nevertheless, we’re trying to work around setbacks that we’re facing along the way to deliver what we believe to be the best possible experience for the citizens of Rijeka.

WordCamp Belfast takeaways

WordCamp Belfast sold 150 tickets which is quite good for the first time WordCamp. Topics were varying, but there was a strong focus on practical topics like SEO, security, social media or copywriting. I liked that because the audience was clearly looking for that kind of topics.

I have to mention Mark Smallman who did a great job to pull everything together. Mark was leading the organization effort with a couple of more hands, and WordCamp was organized very well. Everything went smoothly, I didn’t see any major issues, and as a speaker I had the opportunity to talk with people and maybe – encourage them to help Mark next year :).

There were 2 tracks which makes it impossible to listen to all the talks you want to. I had to miss a couple of talks that I wanted to listen, like Rodolfo Melogli’s talk “Content Marketing: How to Turn your WordPress Website into a Traffic Generation Tool” and Juan Felipe Rincón’s talk about “Managing your online presence on Google Search”. A good thing is that I had a long and interesting talk at the afterparty with Juan Felipe, which was great.

Claire Savage talked about how to write for the web, in her talk “Knowing your words’ worth”. Didn’t stay on the talk until the end because I needed to prepare myself for my own talk, but Claire was rocking the stage with good pieces of advice.

Another one who rocked the stage was Danny Dagan. In his talk “Privacy by Design” he talked about the new law on data protection. Danny gave us a lot to think about and some good advice about what we need to take care of along the way.

Alexandra Draghici talked about user interfaces and how they affect user retention. It was a good talk that explained how to use various system messages (like error and success messages), tooltips, and new feature announcements that will improve user journeys.

Youngest WordCamp attendee

It might be a curiosity, but it’s definitely worth mentioning. WordCamp Belfast had the youngest WordCamp attendee I ever got to meet. It was  14 years old Jack Delaney, a regular on every WordPress Meetup in Belfast. That’s really amazing and could be inspirational to others, seeing that there are kids that want to learn from a young age.

Northern Ireland

Like in Kyiv, it was a good decision to stay in Northern Ireland for a week. It gave me enough time to get a closer view of the city. At the end, it almost felt like being local. It also gave me a perfect opportunity to meet new and interesting people. If you happen to be in Belfast for a couple of days and need to work, I recommend Farset Labs – it’s a great (and really affordable) place to work. And – I met interesting people there that eventually came to WordCamp where we talked some more.

There were two things I wanted to see while in Belfast – Titanic Belfast and Giant’s Causeway, and I got to see both of them.

Titanic Belfast is the biggest Titanic exhibition in the world. In its architecturally perfect building you can see a story of how Titanic was built (it was built in the nearby Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, something people in Belfast are really proud of). But it isn’t a story about Titanic, it is a story of Belfast and how it got transformed from a small city to a giant of linen production in the 19th century, and then to a city with a shipyard that built the biggest ships in the world.

I recommend taking the time to go on a Discovery tour, then visit the museum itself (although you will need at least 2 hours to take a proper look as it is enormous) and at the end go to the nearby SS Nomadic – tender to the Titanic and the last remaining White Star Line ship in the world. (you’ll need at least 4-6 hours to visit everything properly)

Giant’s Causeway is something you should definitely see while visiting Northern Ireland. Sometimes known as the 8th wonder of the world, and for a good reason – the place is really astonishing. I decided to go on a day tour from Belfast which took around 8 hours. During our tour, we went to see the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge too, which has also some amazing scenery.

After this visit, the opportunity to familiarize with Northern Ireland’s WordPress community, seeing the beauties of Giant’s Causeway and Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, as well as Titanic Belfast, I can only say – there’s just a matter of time when I’ll go for another visit.

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P.S. I Love You – A Story About Web Accessibility

Accessibility is something that is really important to me. On the Contributor day at the first WordCamp Europe in Leiden, I was lucky enough to share a desk with the accessibility team. Rian Rietveld and Graham Armfield were among those people, and both of them gave me better insights on the accessibility issues we have on the websites today. In that time both Lucijan and myself started to improve our design and development process to approach accessibility as an even more standard part of our process (we cared about accessibility even before).

Working on the new website for the City of Rijeka, we wanted accessibility to be even more important part of the project. That’s why I was really looking forward to deliver the accessibility talk at WordCamp Kyiv.

A day before I was nervous as I usually am when delivering a talk for the first time. Luckily for me, I got a chance to have a Skype call with Rian, so I showed her one of the final versions of my presentation. She loved it and gave me some more examples and advices I could use, to make people understand the importance of accessibility (thanks Rian for your help with it).

The talk went pretty well, the audience was engaging and what I really loved was the questions. Talking on quite a lot of conferences in the past couple of years, I usually don’t get that much questions at the end, but the Ukrainian community was really engaged.

WordCamp Kyiv

From the organization perspective – it was a WordCamp very well organized (especially for a first time Wordcamp). Having a one track WordCamp is my personal favorite, so I was happy about that decision. The organizing team did a great job to make us feel very welcome. And the Ukrainian community too. After each talk there were so many questions and I thought that questions could just go on and on.

Everybody did an amazing job – from Anna (Kramar, who was the lead organizer), to Andrey (Savchenko, better know as Rarst, who was our speaker contact), to Artem Atsekhovskyi (who did an amazing job crafting the visual identity of the conference, which was in my opinion – one of the better I’ve seen.)

Other organizers (Oleksandr Strikha, Olexiy Fedorov, Vitaly Nikolaev), MCs and volunteers were also amazing. And lastly, I have to mention a man responsible for photography too. Artem Zhavrotskyy did a great job capturing the spirit of the conference. Thanks for having us.

With me in Kiev was Lucijan who gave a talk about Designing in a browser. I don’t know if this was the first time that two brothers have had their own talks on a WordCamp but it sure feels good. :) (and here is Lucijan’s recap)

Getting to know Kiev

Before the conference and in the days after, Lucijan and me went to explore Kiev. The good thing is that we had an organized tour of Kiev (kudos to the organizers for making it happen, I’d really like to see more WordCamps do that since it helps people to get to know cities where WordCamps are organized).

Kiev is an amazing city with more than 500 parks (which makes it really green), and there are quite a lot of churches and monasteries in the city too.

During our tour we visited the Mother Motherland monument (Rodina Mat) – a giant 62 meters statue, sitting on top of the Museum of The History of Ukraine in World War II – both statue and the building together stand 102 meters tall. The statue was even taller, but the top of the sword was cut to make it lower of the cross of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, a historic Orthodox Christian monastery. Pechersk Lavra is one of the seven UNESCO World Heritage sites in Ukraine, and it looks really amazing.

There is something else we wanted to visit – Chernobyl exclusion zone. Now, I wrote about this experience on Facebook, and I don’t want to make this article about Chernobyl. If you want to know about my experience there (and see some photos), you should read the article on Facebook.

I can only say that it is a kind of experience that makes you think. I also believe it is these kind of experiences that makes us more human, more emphatic and at the end – more understandable of others.

Until next year, Kiev.

The post A week in Ukraine for the first WordCamp Kyiv appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

Reason 1: It is an English-speaking WordCamp

Although WordCamps are local events, after having extremely successful WordCamp Croatia last year, this year’s WordCamp Split will be a “national WordCamp”. Last year Croatian WordPress community decided to have one WordCamp per year, and this year our annual WordCamp will be in the amazing city of Split.

This also means that we expect people from all over Croatia but also from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Slovenia, as well as people from other European countries.

As last year, most of the talks will be in English (well, all to be precise, except one talk about WooCommerce which is aimed at local community). Croatia is a well-known tourist destination and most of the people in it speak rather good English so you can expect a lot of interaction on WordCamp and outside it.

Reason 2: Great speakers

WordCamp Split will host some amazing local and international speakers: Tomaž Zaman (Codeable), Luca Sartoni (Automattic), Noel Tock (Human Made), Joško Džidić (Sucuri), Milan Ivanović (ManageWP), Nevena Tomović (ManageWP), Tomislav Leljak (AM2 Studio), Borko Livić (Media X), Andrej Šimunaj (AM2 Studio), Natko Hasić (Convertiv), Lucijan Blagonić (Blagonic Brothers), Emir Kurtović and Nela Dunato.

Every year we host some inspirational stories aimed at local WordPress community. Our aim was to show how you can work and succeed with WordPress no matter where are you living. The world today is more connected than ever and WordPress can be that connective tissue that connects us all together for some greater good. This year we expect memorable storytelling from Tomaž Zaman and Noel Tock about their WordPress journeys.

Here is a brief topics overview:

• Luca Sartoni will talk about growth methodologies in a distributed environment
• Milan Ivanović will talk about WordPress.org theme reviews
• Joško Džidić will talk about website security
• Nevena Tomović will talk about how to write good content
• I’m expecting three great design talks from Lucijan, Nela and Natko, about style-guides, design revisions and branding
• And three great development talks from Andrej, Tomislav and Emir, about REST API, custom URL structures and related posts based on user engagements

Reason 3: Workshops

All workshops except the one from Luca Sartoni about “The art of public speaking” will be in Croatian. Workshops are mostly aimed at local community and are free for everyone. Last year we had around 100 people on 3 workshops with a very good average satisfaction.

This year we will host 5 workshops, 2 of which are hosted by Algebra – our educational partner, and the largest Croatian privately operated educational institution. Topics for workshops are:

• Managing WordPress projects (Krešimir Končić, Neuralab)
• How can your user feel like a superhero in 5 easy steps (Aleksandar Savković, ManageWP)
• Visualization of data collected with WordPress (Konrad Leon Toldy, Algebra)
• The Art of Public Speaking (Luca Sartoni, Automattic)
• My first WordPress plugin (Konrad Leon Toldy, Algebra)

Reason 4: Amazing community

When Croatian WordPress community started three years ago we dreamed big but we took small steps. In the past three years, our community organized more than 20 different WordPress events including meetups in 4 different cities (Zagreb, Split, Rijeka and Pula), one WordPress Global Translation Day (in April of this year), and 1 WordCamp and Contributor day (last year).

In that period we have seen more and more individuals and companies adopting WordPress and the climate is changing in the public and private sectors as well. Currently, largest Croatian open source project is being built on top of WordPress and we have seen some companies that have made an amazing progress working with WordPress projects.

Reason 5: A perfect vacation

Croatia with its beautiful coast and more than a thousand islands is ideal summer destination. And WordCamp Split happening in the first weekend of September is still in the swimming season. When not swimming, you can enjoy Croatian cuisine (in Split it is mostly Mediterranean cuisine similar to Italian, with a lot of fish and seafood and olive oil).

If you are more into wines, you could explore the roots of the world famous Zinfandel.  Zinfandel is grown today in 10% of California’s vineyards, but DNA analysis has revealed that it is genetically equivalent to a local sort of Crljenak Kaštelanski (grown in Split area). Although during centuries Croatia had several indigenous varieties related to Zinfandel the grapes were almost entirely extinct by the phylloxera epidemic of the late 19th century. Lucky for us wine lovers, 9 vines of Crljenak Kaštelanski were discovered in 2001 and are now being grown close to Split.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdy4PF9zPO8

Grab your ticket

Tickets are on sale for $20, and as of today we still have 59 tickets remaining. Hope to see you in Split. :)

p.s. If you liked this article and are planning to come to Split remember to say hi to me at @eblagonic. If you cannot visit our WordCamp Split don’t forget to share this story and we hope to see you next year!

Opening photo by Nick Savchenko

The post 5 reasons to attend WordCamp Split appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

Unlike the first two WordCamps (in Leiden and Sofia; I wasn’t in Seville due to some really busy schedule and personal problems), this year I had this amazing opportunity to take a different role. Having Petya Raykovska with us last year on WordCamp Croatia, I’ve been talking with her if there’s need for help with the communication part. Once a journalist, I’m still much in love with writing and communication so I was part of the WCEU communication team.

The biggest problem for me (was and still is) is something that Sonja Leix so perfectly explained in her talk “My friend the Impostor Syndrome”. I also thought of myself as “not worthy enough”, especially as I didn’t volunteer on previous WCEU’s. This was even more obvious to me, once I saw who is on the team – people that I respect and are well known in the community (and have been organizers or volunteer in the past years).

The imposter syndrome is your inner critic. @sonjaleix at #WCEU pic.twitter.com/oExhQ3IyVD

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 25, 2016

Yeah, I’ve been volunteering and working hard with the local community in Croatia and especially the non-government sector there, and am really passionate about it, but being a part of the team at WordCamp Europe was just overwhelming.

But it shouldn’t be, really. People on the team are just like you and me. Some have more experience, naturally, but all of us possess some expertise that makes us valuable team members. And the team was just unbelievable helpful and supportive and made the whole experience something worth reliving again.

European communities series

If you followed WordCamp Europe blog, then you must have seen the “Meet the European WordPress communities” series. In the 7 articles of the series, you could get to know communities across the continent. We interviewed a lot of people from 28 European countries. From Istanbul to Greenland and from Moscow to Bilbao, we heard some pretty amazing stories about how European communities came to be.

I will probably write a separate post covering this article series, but for now, let’s just say that I feel extremely honored for even getting the possibility to tell these stories. In this process, I got the opportunity to get to know and respect some really inspirational people. When we started to work on the series, one of the first to respond was Takis Bouyouris from Greece. Back then Greece didn’t have their WordCamp but it is now on the schedule for November. On WordCamp Belgrade I met with Aloisia Gabat, currently living in Sweden, which then connected me with other community members from Sweden and Norway.

Rocío Valdivia from Spain, a fellow member of WCEU organizing team, was an important contact for both Spain’s and Portuguese communities. While talking with her I realized I could ask her about the Greenland’s community, so we added Greenland to our article as well.

Now, you need to know that our starting point was a document that listed European WordCamps, but even with that information we lacked info about the local community organizers. A lot of effort has been invested into the discovery of different communities. For example, I like to learn about new WordCamps so I stumbled upon WordCamp Torino who has been organized by Francesca Marano. I didn’t know Francesca back then (February) but I sent her an email to respond to our survey and she did. Later did I learn the amazing story about “The rebirth of the Italian community” and couple of months ago (and couple of weeks before publishing the article) I asked her and other community members (including another WCEU organizer, Luca Sartoni) to answer a few more questions and fill out the blanks, so we could get the backstory as well. These sort of approach was crucial to understanding community problems and how to overcome those.

There was all sort of marvelous stories. Belgian community, for example, hosted their first WordCamp in Antwerp, just a week after the article was published. We were witnesses to other amazing stories, like the one of French or United Kingdom’s community. It wouldn’t be fair not to mention our own communities – from Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia – that were non-existent 3 years ago; and so on. A lot of great stories can be found in these articles.

Communities from Bosnia&Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia on #wceu 14&16 thx @damndirty pic.twitter.com/bd6xMRjNnK

— Emanuel Blagonic (@eblagonic) June 26, 2016

WordCamp Europe

Writing community articles was an exhausting but rewarding task for me. While talking with all these people, you witness their passion and by telling these stories we were hoping we could make a place for all the relevant information about each community (like who are the local organizers, links to meetups, WordCamps, and social networks etc).

But there is one constant whenever I talked with them – they all recognized the importance of WordCamp Europe as a place to meet once per year.
Some communities like Croatian or Belgian (and even Serbian, although they held their first meetup a year before) started after the first WordCamp Europe in Leiden. That was the tipping point for all of them. Other communities like the Italian one, were restarted after they met at WordCamp Europe in Sofia and Seville.

There is a significant importance of this “big” WordCamp (of European WordCamps) that has been connecting people across Europe, with all their different languages and different cultural norms – for the past 4 years. Once per year we all stand together as friends, discuss business opportunities, best practices to contribution and building communities, and we enjoy an awesome afterparty.

WordCamp Europe Talks

While leading the Communication team, I didn’t get the chance to watch all the talks I wanted. But, here’s an overview of the talks I watched and I thought they were amazing.

WordPress: the early years. A co-founder’s view by Mike Little — Mike is a co-founder of WordPress and I got the chance to speak with him at speakers dinner. I never spoke with him before but from what I heard he is an amazing guy. It is true. We discussed his own past (he started to work in IT back in 1978) and the early years of the internet. We didn’t discuss WordPress, but I asked him how he feels now when WordPress is changing the world. Mike is also a world-changer, he supports a project called Young Rewired State which helps kids to start programming. A really amazing project that I’ll see if we can take into Croatia as well.

https://twitter.com/wceurope/status/746246169081294848

Empathy and Acceptance in Design and Community by Morten Rand–Hendriksen — Morten held one of the best talks of WCEU. Talking about empathy, he discussed common problems in the open source community and showed some breath-taking examples of how people overcome obstacles.

[NEXT, 11:30] in Halle E: @mor10 from @lynda about the “Empathy and Acceptance in Design and Community” #WCEU pic.twitter.com/iI4QSslbWz

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 24, 2016

Reviews: The Good, The Bad, and the Stalker by Mika Epstein — Mika told us all about the Plugin review process and what people should and shouldn’t do. The most important takeaway from this talk is to think twice before commenting and especially – never comment angrily. Think twice!

[NEXT, 16:00] in Halle E @Ipstenu talks about reviews: “Reviews: The Good, The Bad, and the Stalker” #WCEU pic.twitter.com/AwvtGBjuQO

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 24, 2016

Beyond SEO: copywriting for professionals by Marieke van de Rakt, Joost de Valk — was a talk with a lot of examples and best practices on why is good content important for SEO. My personal best moment of the talk was when Marieke showed us a picture of their family. Being a devoted father myself, I know how important is the family and all the time you spend with them.

This is ours biggest achievement. @MariekeRakt @jdevalk #WCEU pic.twitter.com/1GV3vKO3fT

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 24, 2016

The (rebirth of the) Italian community by Francesca Marano (article) — although I’ve seen this talk before, it stops to amaze me to hear the story about the Italian community. Since it was early morning, the attendance wasn’t at peak levels, but Francesca’s talk is one that you should watch on WordPress.tv.

My friend the Impostor Syndrome by Sonja Leix — this one was a sort of talk that was familiar to quite a lot of attendees. Personally, I had problems when going on stage after once I blacked out while on stage (I wrote about that here). So, Sonja, my respect goes to you for being an inspiration. (Tom Nowell from Automattic talked about Handling Anxiety just after Sonja’s talk, which was also perfect).

[NEXT, 10:00] in Halle G we’ll have a talk about “the Impostor Syndrome”. Please welcome @sonjaleix #WCEU pic.twitter.com/fAPstgirPA

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 25, 2016

The Science of Happiness by Davor Altman (article) — I first met Davor at WordCamp Belgrade where he held a different talk and he’s one positive guy. For everyone interested in customer support, this is the talk you should listen once it becomes available.

Open source project management at scale, how 1300+ people improved Drupal 8’s multilingual features by Gábor Hojtsy — Gábor gave a really inspirational talk about the power of the open source and how the Drupal community improved Drupal by working together. Actually, this talk was not about Drupal it was about the power of open source and I recommend to watch it. This is kind of talks that we definitely need more on WordCamps.

It's amazing to listen @gaborhojtsy story about his involvement with Drupal. #WCEU pic.twitter.com/0DJ0f4gPXu

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 25, 2016

What’s on my watchlist?

• Assistive Technology Demo by Graham Armfield — because I think accessibility is important
• Keys to Growing & Developing your WordPress Meetup by Dee Teal
• Contributing to WordPress for Business, Profession & the Community by Kel Santiago-Pilarski
• Seven Times Faster : A Study in frontend Optimization by Peter Wilson
• “Caring is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.”— Thoughts on WordPress Plugin UI by Caspar Hübinger
• Code is Poetry: A Musician’s Tale by Helen Hou-Sandí — I heard only appraisals for this talk, the only that (as far as I’m aware) got the standing ovations. Bravo, Helen!

Lead #WordPress developer & musician @helenhousandi making brilliant parallels between music & code. #WCEU pic.twitter.com/1hkTpfsR48

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 25, 2016

• Art Directed Web Typography by Marko Dugonjić — well, it’s Marko :) and this should have been good
• WordPress, state of the accessibility by Rian Rietveld — I first met Ryan at the first WCEU and she’s been doing an important work for WordPress in the accessibility field (along others, of course)
• Changing the world, one WordPress site at a time: How we built a successful, distributed WordPress firm serving nonprofits by Lesley Molecke
• You are too cheap by Tomaz Zaman — well, it’s Tomaž :) and he was wearing a Superman t-shirt (again, it’s Tomaž, a man who jumps out of the perfectly good plane o.O)
• Dealing with different client cultures by Karim Marucchi

Lucijan’s talk

So, at WordCamp Europe I listened (and tweeted, of course) the talk from my younger brother Lucijan. He was talking about “Moving the design process to the browser” and he did a pretty good job. Yes, he was nervous, but who wouldn’t get nervous in front of the 400+ people, eager to learn something new?

[NEXT, 11:30] in Halle G is @lblagonic (@blagonic) about “Moving the design process to the browser” #WCEU pic.twitter.com/tyfwg7C9Wb

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 25, 2016

He survived :)

Some final thoughts

WordCamps are organized for the people. And WordCamp Europe with more than 2000 attendees was something extraordinary. Feeling that positive energy, meeting new people, seeing old friends – this is the true power of community.

Being part of the awesome organizing team was another “stepping out of my comfort zone” action. Thank’s to the rest of the team for making it happen.

One of the most famous poems from Croatian poet Dobriša Cesarić is named Waterfall. It basically tells a story about one single droplet, which nevertheless it feels small– it is important because a waterfall can only be made of many single droplets. And once the rainbow appears this single droplet shines in its beauty.
Everyone could be that single droplet, but we could make something great only if we work together. So, a couple of thanks at the end.

• Thank you Petya for that first talk in Rijeka, when you said that I might be of help with the WCEU 2016 and for help and guidance you offered for the community series.
• Thanks to everyone in the team for I felt welcome.
• Thank you, Jenny Beaumont, for proofreading the articles in the community series. It wouldn’t be the same without your help.
• Thanks to all that participated in the community article series. I hope you liked it in the end and that people who read it learned a lot.
• Last but not least, thanks to the people in our Community team at #WCEU: Lucijan, Phillip, Adelina, Priscilla, Alen, Isabelle, Franz, and Bronson. (here are some stats until Saturday, 2pm)

More than 900 different users tweeted more than 2700 times for a 1,8 million reach and 6,2m impressions. <3 #WCEU pic.twitter.com/5ahqGUu0A9

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 25, 2016

At the end I can only say, see you next year in Paris. Tickets are already purchased. :)

p.s.
As a designer, I have to say that Scott Evans and Sonja Leix did an amazing job with the WordCamp Europe graphics and kudos to Scott for the great illustrations he made. I love them.

Photo of @lblagonic and me just after the 2nd day of #wceu was over :) @blagonic brothers in Vienna ;) pic.twitter.com/ExlhBn6WdL

— Emanuel Blagonic (@eblagonic) June 28, 2016

The post Takeaways from WordCamp Europe 2016 appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

Don’t want to read the whole story? Skip to a “challenge me” part :)

When I got my first computer, and it was Commodore 16 (Google it if you think there’s only Commodore 64), I wanted to build something digital. I started playing around with a german handbook that explained the basics of programming (and I never studied German for that matter) and in there I found some example code that used built-in circuits to produce sound (one of my favorite, being a kid who grew up near the beach, was the sound of waves hitting the pebble beach).

But, I was never into programming. My creative brain couldn’t figure that out.

Later, in high school, I figured out that I like to be a creative mind. Being the kind of a curious person who likes to explore the world around it, I tried various things. Writing is one of those and at that high school period I wrote some satire pieces, and at one point I wrote a short piece inspired by Albert Camus book “The stranger”. I remember showing it to my Croatian literature teacher and she didn’t believe that I myself wrote that. It’s a funny memory.

In high school, I became hooked up to design and computers in general. Internet connections at 14,4k, designing first websites in Netscape Navigator Gold and learning HTML tags with books that I bought for myself with my summer earnings. I was proud and I was curious and I really believed that this is the future.

When I finished high school I worked as a journalist for a local television (I even had my own TV show, before I was 20), tried my luck with video production (where I worked on some music videos and commercials). So, I picked creative jobs and with journalism I picked a job that matter and that could change people lives.

Three years ago

Fast forward to 2012, it was the happiest year of my life. My then-wife and I found out that we will become parents. It was a risk pregnancy and we were scared (especially not being able to have a kid for a couple of years), but everything went out well when Luka was born.

In that year, I was celebrating the 10th anniversary of my professional career. In these 10 years, I worked for hundreds of clients, from small, family-owned companies to large international corporations. Lucijan (my brother) and I were in the narrow circle of people who worked on web standards in Croatia, we educated clients and showed them how the future could look like. Then responsive design came along and we advocated that as well, as one of the first people to do so in Croatia. I was also a strong advocate of WordPress and open source, wrote articles and talked on conferences about it. Life was good back then but trouble was just around the corner.

In 2013 I filed divorce papers. Luka was growing up and that was my only concern. Filing for divorce was just the first of the problems. Personal and mostly financial problems came next, then professional problems when we had to cut our expenses and let people go. I got back to freelance and my hourly price was getting higher every couple of months.

When problems started to POP up I had to make some difficult choices. Like, to reduce my speaking engagement and not going to start speaking in English. I also had a lot of other decisions to make like how can I be a good father to my son when I’m living 300 kilometers away.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFPaT3RjJ0Z/?taken-by=emanuelblagonic

I started writing a blog. I called it “Dad’s diary” and it quickly gained some popularity because there are not a lot of dad writers in Croatia. I didn’t care (and still don’t care about “being popular”). What I care is making this world a better place. For my son, for everyone’s children. The biggest takeaway of writing a blog is that people contact you and tell you when they had similar problems. They open. They talk. And since I don’t see a problem in sharing my personal feelings and learnings with others, I’m quite in a comfortable position to help others. That’s why I write that blog from time to time. The second reason is that writing helps me focus on real issues a divorced dad has to focus on.

And with this blog, I even got published in the mom’s section of the biggest Croatian online portal. <3

First WordCamp Europe

As for many, first WordCamp Europe was a life changer for me too. I 2013 I was already more than 7 years in WordPress world. I was the loudest advocate of it in Croatia and a lot of people referred to me when they wanted to point out a “WordPress guy”.

Lucijan, Zoran (my company partner) and I went to WordCamp Europe as we were running a WordPress agency back then. It was a tough journey, though since we had to make some difficult decisions on the future of our company (we closed it next year).

But what we learned about the community helped us to organize the first WordPress Coffee in Zagreb (this first Coffee was an informal event where around 40 people from all over Croatia came up, some of them had to stay for a night because driving back home was too risky, and a long journey). I personally asked some people I knew work with WordPress like Jurica Zuanović who was (and still is) the Editor of Croatian translation; and Goran Šerić (a passionate WordPress developer).

Croatia community started and around 20 meetups later we’re preparing our second WordCamp in Split.

Why is this part important? I loved WordPress for years but that was the first time that I really had the opportunity to give back. A lot. In 2014. we (as a community) organized 5 meetups, year after around 10 and so on. I served as the lead organizer of the first WordCamp Croatia (and probably the last since Foundation changed the rules for naming WordCamps). I took a couple of weeks off my job to organize everything (and Zoran helped a lot too). It was a blast.

WordPress really gave me a lot and that’s when I realized that working with people and building a community (from 0 to 2600/900/450+ members on Facebook/Meetup.com/Twitter) is something that makes me happy.

In that time, I also worked a lot with non-government organizations and we started talking with the city of Rijeka to build the first ever solution for cities and counties in Croatia, that will be open sourced to everyone, under GPL license.

Looking for a challenge… and ready for a change

For some months now I have been lacking new challenges. I challenged myself so I started applying to talk on different WordCamps (and 3 of 4 accepted my talk; thank you London, Nürnberg and Belgrade). This year I talked 6 times on How WordPress changed the face of Croatia politics (WordCamp London, UK; WordCamp Nürnberg, Germany; WordPress Meetup Ljubljana, Slovenia; Weblica Čakovec, Croatia; WordCamp Belgrade, Serbia; Open Source Days Zagreb, Croatia).

I challenged myself by giving my energy to the project we are working with Rijeka (and we’re close to ending now). Sometimes I ask myself why we do some things we do? And my answer is:

Because if we don’t do it then we have no right to ask others to do it for us. Because it is our job as designers to make the world a better place. And to make it a better place for our children.

But I’m ready for a new challenge. For some months now I have been declining new projects. For a year, I only took projects that I found interesting and challenging enough. Will I learn something new? Then I took it. Will this project benefit the public? Then I took it.

What kind of challenge I’m searching for? I don’t yet know. :)

I want to be able to speak to people and meet new people. I want to be able to go to conferences and share my experiences with others. I want to learn and learn and learn. Because that’s in my DNA. I want to be able to work on projects that can shape the future. And the perfect challenge would be if I can work with people and communities too. This makes me happy.

Most of all, I want to be able to be a good father to my son. I can do that by being happy and passionate about what I’m doing. Being happy and passionate is my biggest driving force and luckily – I still have that in me. <3

Have a challenge? Get in touch.

I’m not searching for a new job, but I’m searching for a new challenge. For years, I’ve been accepting projects not because of an insane amount of money but projects that were challenging to me or projects that could make an impact on the community (like the one we’re working with Rijeka).

Think you have something I might be interested? Great! But, before you get in touch please take 3 minutes to watch this video.

Did you experience butterflies in your stomach when you watched the video? Did you? And you have a challenge? Get in touch and let me know ;)

—

Have something to add to this story? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

The post Time for new challenges appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

It is always inspiring to see communities grow. While writing community article series for WordCamp Europe blog, I got a unique opportunity to peak into communities from all over Europe. Being one of the community organizers in Croatia, I am well aware of the amount of work you have to put into preparing meetups and eventually a WordCamp. And I have to say that the Serbian community did an amazing job this year.

The thing is that I witnessed more people than the year before and there were 2 tracks instead of one like last year. Having 2 tracks allowed for easier going schedule – although presentations were 25 minutes, there was usually at least 15 minute to the next one.

Speakers you shouldn’t miss on WordPress.tv

Luca Sartoni

Luca talked about Growth methodologies in a distributed environment. It was an interesting talk but I didn’t expect anything less from Luca. Automattic is a distributed company and Luca shared insights on working with a team that is spanned across couple timezones and can almost never work together.

On Contributor day he did a workshop on Public speaking.I can say that if you have time you should definitely attend Luca’s Public speaking workshop. Later on, Luca introduced us to communities and what it means to be a part of the Chapter with a lot of facts about organizing a meetup or a WordCamp.

Nevena Tomović

Nevena works as a Growth Enginner for Devana Technologies and ManageWP. She did a talk on How to grow your business by producing quality blog posts. Nevena’s talk was the one with most questions on which she answered without hassle. She also explained some rules on writing quality content and how to make some ground rules for visiting bloggers. Although this is her first talk on WordCamp, I predict her a bright future.

Ivana Ćirković

I didn’t know Ivana personally before WordCamp Belgrade. As with everything in this online world, later I realized I actually knew her work and respect that. Ivana did an introductory or even better – inspirational talk on how and why she decided to go with WordPress. Although it is not a kind of talk aimed for advanced developers, we should all remember that WordCamps are not only for advanced people – they are open for everyone and I look forward to seeing her talk on our WordPress Meetup Zagreb (Ivana, hope you’re coming in September).

Davor Altman

Davor’s story was an interesting one since only three years ago he worked in a call centre for an Italian company. Myself, being professionally in web business for more than 13 years find that extremely interesting since in those 3 years Davor showed us what can be done if you are persistent and have a desire to learn. His talk is titled From Call Centre to Automattic and you should watch it once it become available on WordPress.tv.

How WordPress changed the face of Croatian politics?

This is not the first time I held this talk but I’ve seen progress in me presenting it. Also, this time I was speaking to an audience that knows exactly what I’m talking about – the problems in both Croatia and Serbia are pretty much the same – with a high unemployment, economic recession, poverty and corruption. What is my final goal with this talk is not to give you solutions to problems but to show you that we as individuals can do a lot more if we’re open for change.

In 2003. WordPress revolutionized publishing and now, 13 years later, city of Rijeka in Croatia want to build a platform on top of WordPress, a platform that every other city and county in Croatia (and in region) can use free of charge. Since everything from design to HTML templates and WordPress theme will be available under GPL license, I can only tell that WordPress will help transparency as well. Coming from a country that still struggles with its democratic principles – it is a huge step forward.

If you were on this talk I would appreciate your feedback.

—

Thank you Belgrade and see you next year.

Intro photo by Ivan Gatić

The post Another year, another WordCamp Belgrade appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

Talking at my first WordCamp

This is the first WordCamp I actually gave a talk at. Being extremely active in the Croatian WordPress community as co-organizer of WordPress Meetup in Zagreb (with my brother Lucijan) and lead organizer of the first WordCamp Croatia – this was a natural next step for me. Stepping out from my comfort zone was an important task as well. I gave a lot of talks on Croatian web/tech conferences (including some very prominent ones) about design, information architecture and WordPress, but this was completely new territory for me.

I was planning to give talk at some of Europes WordCamp for some time now (maybe even as long as 2 years) but was troubled with some (personal and financial) problems I couldn’t step out from. Now, 2 years later things are coming to a good pace again. At WordCamp London I talked about our project for the city of Rijeka asking a question if WordPress can change the political transparency of an entire country?

I really believe in making our world a better place for our kids and being a father myself – this is one priority that I’m not willing to negotiate on.

Love the comments after my talk – people were happy to share their thoughts and I want to thank all of them. These first comments count a lot. Slides from my talk are here and if you were at the talk I would really appreciate some feedback.

WordCamp London organization

I wish to thank all the organizers and volunteers. My deepest respect goes to Franz Vitulli for helping me out with some points on my talk day before the conference. You probably think you didn’t do such an important job, but man – you did. Thank you.

Also, organizing team did an amazing job and volunteers were always there to help. Cudos to Jenny, Ana, Diane and Gary (hope I didn’t miss someone out).

Special mention goes to Barbara Marcantonio for her work on creating this stunning visual identity and Wapu for WordCamp London. Outstanding work Barbara.

5 favorite talks

What should I say about talks. Inspirational, motivating, eye-opening. I was on couple of them and some of them were really important to listen.

Leena Haque — The Myth of a Normal Brain: Rewiring conventional thinking and the benefits of embracing Neurodiversity

This is (for me at least) the best talk of the conference. Leena is a super woman, really a super woman. She talked about her fighting autism and her story was a super important and inspiring one. With so many different disabilities out there, from autism spectrum conditions (ASC), AD(H)D, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Dyscalculia, Tourette’s and Learning Disabilities – we have to take better care of how we approach this kind of people. Leena, you rock!

Talk from @The_Lil_Hulk about #Neurodiversity is a higlight of the day and it could easily be of a conference. Amazing and powerful. #wcldn

— Emanuel Blagonic (@eblagonic) April 9, 2016

My utmost respect @The_Lil_Hulk for walking out on a stage and showing us how to cope with life. Thank you. Don't stop. #wcldn

— Emanuel Blagonic (@eblagonic) April 9, 2016

Francesca Marano — The Rebirth of the Italian Community

Another great presentation has come from Francesca about the Italian WordPress community. Italians like to talk and gesticulate (I know, been there so many times) and they love to eat (I know since we have similar cuisine in Istria too).

And now they organized WordCamp Torino after they were dormant for a couple of years. Passion and inspiration to build other communities are the greatest benefits you could get take with you after this talk.

Amazing job of Italian WordPress community #wcldn from talk of @MeetTheCohens pic.twitter.com/Q0zUbA3U67

— Emanuel Blagonic (@eblagonic) April 10, 2016

Graham Armfield – Accessible Accordions for Your WordPress Theme

Grahams’ talk was about accessibility. Those of you who don’t know, Graham is also a member of Make WordPress Accessbile Team which takes care, well, of WordPress. Graham talked about how to make accessible accordions.

What I learned not only on this talk but generally, is that we don’t realize what are the problems people with disabilities face every day when using websites. Grahams’ talk was excellent, on point and informative. I was also at Accessibility Q&A panel that talked about accessibility issues and was very interesting

Petya Raykovska — We need to talk about the REST API – a guide for non-developers

I joked about Petya’s talk that it’s the first talk about REST API that I actually understand. Jokes aside, Petya gave an interesting and inspiring talk about the REST API as the future of WordPress. With a lot of side notes and explanations she showed us that we shouldn’t be afraid of the REST API since the themes won’t disappear and this will boost WordPress into direction where it wasn’t before like building custom applications. Also, there was this awesome Wapu of the day :).

aaand, Wapuu of the day award goes to @scottsweb for his Troubled Wapuu #wcldn pic.twitter.com/4Hc7zqX8wf

— Emanuel Blagonic (@eblagonic) April 10, 2016

Adrian Restantia, Ilona Filipi — Building An Innovative WordPress Agency: Mooves’ 5 Year Journey

Adrian and Ilonas’ talk about the Mooves’ agency 5 year journey was the first on the WordCamp repertoire and was an interesting one. Adrian gave us recap of their first 5 years and Ilona gave us tips about how to repeat their success.

Few honorable mentions

Tammy Lister did a good talk about design patterns and Ben Furfie talked about his mistakes from freelancing career. Mark Wilkinson talked about how to publish your plugin at WordPress.org and Dmitry Mayorov talked about “7 Tips On Getting Your Theme Approved The First Time”.

See you next year

WordCamp London was a blast and I can wait to be here again next year if my obligations will permit. WordCamps are opportunities for you to get to know new and interesting people that are heavily involved in WordPress and the community energy is simply amazing both at WordCamp days and on Contributor day. If you want to learn new things WordPress and want to get involved in the local communities then feel free to choose to which WordCamp you want to go next ;).

The post WordCamp London 2016 Recap appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

WordPress in Croatia is still considered a “blog tool”, so when Rijeka decided to go with it—being a third largest city—it was a major thing. It was then that we suggested to go with “design in the open” approach and to give all files produced in the process as open source under GPL. And they said yes.

Now, six months into this project and seeing an end to it, I am more than satisfied with how the things turned out. The whole project sparkled the community with people constantly asking “how is it going” and “thanks for sharing”.

Since this kind of transparency in building a website for local self-government was never before achieved it got a lot of traction in both media and community. We didn’t know what to expect, though, since none of the extra work (like writing a blog (in Croatian), creating educational workshops or making changes to our workflow because we went GPL) was even budgeted. But we believed this was the right thing to do.

Listening to professionals

Rijeka has been awarded the title of “the most transparent city in Croatia” for years in a row but that wouldn’t be enough if we didn’t have a partner in them. Brainstormings and a lot of wireframing in the beginning of the project pawed solid grounds for further development.

We decided to focus on “what users need” so we asked citizens from Rijeka to answer a poll. That helped us both understand their needs as well as to validate our own ideas and approaches.

We were on the right track.

For an entire month, I lived in Rijeka and worked closely with a team from within the city to come up with initial designs. We addressed a lot of issues and substantial progress has been made. And even before delivering designs, we showed wireframes to both city officials and citizens in a special workshop.

Since end results will be available under GPL, we also approached other cities and asked them about their problems with current websites.

What we found helped us create a good initial design with a focus on user needs.

Since this project was special for being the first of its kind – we invested (and are still investing) a lot of extra effort. This wouldn’t be possible without a help from other amazing colleagues and friends.

Educational conference

On Thursday, February 9th, Rijeka in its city hall hosted an educational half-day conference with speakers covering topics like copywriting for the web, importance of SEO and how to maximize reach on social networks. Talks were held by renowned speakers like Nebojša Grbačić from Copyraonica, Dragan Barišić from Mijena and Iva Soldo from Bamboo Lab.

But for me, the most important talk was held by a blind man. Danijel Horvat explained problems that blind and partially sighted people have in accessing the web helping us understand their struggle. From the beginning, we thought about the accessibility of the new website and now we’re seeing it as an opportunity to lay grounds for even better understanding on the local and (more importantly) – national level.

Remarkable comments

So far – the comments were more than inspirational to us. Even the introductory Q&A with the citizens outreached our expectations. More than 100 people responded and we got some really quality feedback.

The same feedback has been given to us by Croatian design communities – from front-end developers to WordPress community both feedback and comments were remarkable.

When you’re walking the path of transparency you must be prepared for all sort of questions. In the process – there were some negative comments (mostly about the price) but we responded to, well – most of them. When we got a question that was not a hateful question – we did our best to respond – even if we didn’t agree with some of the remarks.

I believe in the freedom of speech and I strongly believe in the political transparency and especially when we talk about government and local self–governments. Croatia is a young democracy and we’re still trying to walk the right path. We have obstacles—for sure—but every democracy was like that in the beginning. This might be a pioneering project for Croatia and a lot of dots had to be connected so that we could work on it. Today, this makes me both happy and proud.

Hear the story

I’d like to share this story with you. It had it’s ups and downs but at the end, it’s a story with a happy end. We’re still a month and a half away from delivering the finalized website but it should be ready just for WordCamp London and WordCamp Nuremberg – where I’ll do my best to share it with you. See you in London and in Nuremberg.

The post Can WordPress change the political transparency of an entire country? appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

So, you’re working with WordPress. Professionally. Individually or as part of an agency? Did you think of applying to speak at WordCamp Europe? No? Read on.

WordCamp Europe is the largest European WordCamp which is being held in the beautiful city of Vienna from June 24th to 26th. WordCamp Europe is getting bigger every year and it is believed it might be the biggest WordCamp in the world. Well, 1750 people already bought their ticket and there are many more people on waiting list.

But, let’s leave numbers aside. You’re reading this article so I can get you persuaded to apply to speak at WordCamp Europe 2016.

#1 Biggest European WordCamp

Having to talk at such a big conference can be intimidating. I know, because every time I climbed on stage – I was worried. Nevertheless you’re speaking in front of 20 or 200 or 500 people. You always want to do your best.

But, WordCamp Europe is a unique opportunity. It is an opportunity for you to show what you know not only to people present but to a global community as well. Everything is filmed and your talk video could be seen by thousands of members of the community across the world.

And WCEU can be a perfect place to kick off your speaking career – if that’s something you want to do.

#2 Attendees from 60+ countries

If talking at the biggest European WordCamp is not enough by itself, let’s just say that WCEU will have attendees from more than 60 countries across all continents. Well, except Antartica of course :).

Imagine the possibilities for meeting new and interesting people, designers and developer – from any corner of the world?

#3 Networking and new business prospects

Before and after your talk (see what I did there? If you come this far, you’re one step closer to apply to speak) there will be enough time for networking with people.

That are colleagues that do pretty much the same job that we do. Maybe they are doing it a bit differently and this will be a perfect opportunity to share experiences. One thing I’m pretty sure of is – they kick ass in WordPress.

Being a speaker at a large conference is something that is good for you ego (let’s be frank) :) and it will be much easier to talk to people after that.

Nevertheless you’re freelancing or working in (or running) an agency, business prospects are tremendous as well. With so many different people (some of them are business owners) there are so many potential partnership opportunities.

#4 A ticket that is missing

Not less important, but if you didn’t buy your ticket just yet (and there are currently no tickets available) as a speaker you will get a complimentary free ticket for the conference.

Being a part of WCEU is like going to a sold out rock concert. Everyone wants to go but only a few of them got tickets. :)

#5 You can do it

This is a perfect time to leave your comfort zone. You’re not in WordPress from yesterday. You worked with WordPress for years and want to share your knowledge with the community. We all have to start somewhere so nevertheless you talked at conferences before – organizers are asking everyone to apply.

If you’re feeling uncomfortable, applying to speak is only the first step which does not guarantee you will get selected (since there are so many great talks out there). But, it is important to try.

WordPress was always about sharing and WordCamp Europe is a perfect opportunity to share back some of your knowledge.

Apply to speak at WordCamp Europe 2016 – applications closes on Sunday, January 31st at 23:59 (CET).

Good luck.

The post 5 reasons you have to apply to talk at WordCamp Europe appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

After the first WordPress Meetup we helped organize last month, Zagreb was home to one other event that is really important for the design community. Guys at UX Passion did a great job organizing WIAD in Croatia. Thumbs up for that.

Talks

There were 5 talks during the day with a final panel discussion where all the speakers discussed different career paths and their own design processes.

IA — reality, not a dream

Lucijan and I gave the first talk of the day. We talked about how to organize your day–to–day web design tasks to involve more information architecture. Since we have a different (non–agency) background we emphasized the importance of everyday learning and educating clients (thing we do a lot these days). Lucijan also gave a more technical overview of our design process, how we change it every few months and even some tips & tricks like using Dropbox to better organize your clients.

Foraging for Creativity

Tin Kadoić from Brlog talked about the creative process and the creativity itself while connecting design with world’s best chef – René Redzepi, and his work in Noma, a two–Michelin star restaurant. As Tin said: “Creativity is a skill, innovation is a process” and I couldn’t agree more on this.

Navigating the Mobile World

After first break Merlin Rebrović took the stage with his talk about navigation patterns on mobile platforms. Since mobile platforms are everywhere around us with their palm–sized screens, Merlin gave some insightful thoughts about how to follow the platform guidelines (iOS/Android) rather than to improvise with our own (usually wrong) navigational patterns.

The Container Model

Konstantin Weiss from world–known IA, explained how they used a container model in web design. With a different usage than usual (no sidebar, i.e.) it’s not suited for every use there is. Since we never used a container model in our web design process it sure was interesting hearing this talk, since “container model facilitates clarity in communication” – what is rather important for us.

No one wants to use your product!

Last talk before the panel was from Goran Peuc. As usual, Goran was a bit challenging to the audience with the talk “No one wants to use your product!”. He talked about how people actually don’t care about your products and instead care about the final outcome of using a product.

Panel: Processes and career paths

At the end of the day Vibor took a stand and asked us all sort of questions about how we started, how our process evolved and so on. Since we all came from different backgrounds it was interesting to hear how others see creativity and what are the challenges they’re facing.

From my perspective the most important thing is to love what you do. I see my job as some sort of a creative playground and since I’m always playing I really love what I do :).

First WIAD in Croatia

With all the tickets gone in just a few hours and with around 100 people on waiting list for the first WIAD event in Croatia I can say that it was a success. Organized in Kino Europa it was like being in a living room watching the talks on your TV. Cosy atmosphere, snacks and beer in the afternoon, WIAD in Zagreb was organized perfectly.

I’m already looking forward to the next year event and the opportunity to see interesting people that are designing with passion.

• Article about WIAD 2014 on UX Passion blog

The post 1. World Information Architecture Day in Croatia appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

I used this article to write down some moments and thoughts that I had while being one of the organizers of Croatian WordPress Community. Learn how to build a WordPress community with a story on how we started Croatian WordPress community.

First moves

We knew that a lot of people in Croatia use WordPress as their “CMS of choice”. Nevertheless, in Croatia WordPress is considered mostly as a “blog engine” rather than a full–blown CMS. Because of that we have problems explaining clients “What can WordPress do?”. During small–talk with different people at WordCamp Europe we realized that we actually create some amazing stuff in WordPress not only in Croatian but in the European standards as well.

So we started thinking what should we do and how to build a WordPress community.

Our goals at the time

• we want to help people build amazing websites with WordPress
• we want to broaden the word about WordPress, not only for the community but for the potential clients as well
• finally, we want to organize a WordCamp in Zagreb

Since we didn’t now much WordPress developers in Croatia we wanted to meet them first and it was decided that the informal meeting is a better choice than something formal like a Meetup.

With the help from Netokracija (leading technology magazine in the region) we spread the word about WordPress Coffee. Although we thought that anything more than 15 attendants will be a huge success, around 40 people from all over Croatia RSVPed. We were excited that there was so many interested people. WordPress Coffee was held in a small Cafe near Faculty of electrical engineering and computing and it was a success. People started talking to each other and everyone was excited that something positive is happening after many years.

During this time we opened a Twitter account (@wpcroatia), as well as Facebook group (WordPress Hrvatska, it’s open for everyone that understands Croatian) and website (http://wpcroatia.com). All this channels are used to promote WordPress community only.

Organizing a Meetup

After WordPress Coffee we created a poll to see what people think about further events. Couple of questions were asked like:

• How are you connected with WordPress
• What would you want us to focus on next
• Are you interested in being a part of future events and how often would you want future events to happen
• Would you be willing to talk on future events
• What talk format do you prefer

We had the answers and most of them didn’t surprise us. Most of the community was interested (85%) to have regular WordPress events. 30/30% percent said that this should happen every 2 or 3 months. 50% of those who responded said that they are willing to talk at the events and 40% would help organize them. The numbers were just amazing.

Venue

While we were searching for a good venue to host a meetup we were contacted from CARNet (Croatian academic and research network). This was important for us since CARNet is probably the most important educational institution in Croatia covering information technologies. They provided the excellent venue for the WordPress Meetup Zagreb with around 100 seats and live–streaming capabilities.

Community Interest

Meetup was announced month and a half before it would take place. We had invited everyone to submit their talk. At this point we didn’t have much engagement (to be completely honest) but we managed to arrange 4 talks, 20 minutes each.

Next step was to open a Meetup page on Meetup.com and to allow anyone to register for the Meetup. In the first seven days we completely sold out our first WordPress Meetup Zagreb and everything is even bigger success if you know that we didn’t advertised it except on our own channels (Twitter/Facebook/Newsletter).

Meetup Day

We didn’t over–prepare for the Meetup. When it started more than 70 people were present and at some point we had around 250 live–stream viewers online.

For the first Meetup we’ve decided to go with a 4×20 minutes talk so we can give everyone a chance to speak and not to be afraid to do so. Since we didn’t know how much WordPress knowledge would the audience have, we decided to have different talk levels, from beginner to advanced. By the talk order, the first speakers were:

1. Jurica Zuanović – “WordPress in Croatian”
2. Tomaž Zaman – “I don’t have a clue” (story about how Codeable was started)
3. Goran – “WordPress as a framework”
4. Zoran Ugrina – “Modern WordPress development”

Problems we wanted to solve

In the period after WordPress Coffee but before WordPress Meetup (around two and a half months) we did some research on what are the biggest problems in the community. Most of the people said this:

• No events (we were solving this problem in the meantime)
• WordPress localization should be better
• No “central place” to talk with other WordPress community members (we were working on that as well)
• Better recognition for WordPress in Croatia

No events

We were solving this problem in the same time we were asking the questions. Couple of us started to prepare the first WordPress Meetup Zagreb.

Better WordPress localization

Since most of the people said this to be one of the biggest problems we got in touch with Jurica Zuanović, who is responsible for translating WordPress to Croatian language. Jurica said that the biggest problem for him is the lack of people that are involved in the process and because of that we asked him if he would be willing to give a talk about localization.

Before and after the Meetup many people volunteered to help and we are thinking of bringing some professional readers on board, that will go through the translation and help fix it.

Central place to talk with other community members

For the past years there was no central place. We’re building our central place around http://www.wpcroatia.com (this will take some time since we all have some regular jobs, if you’re willing to help drop me a line;). The idea is to have a blog, list of helpful tools at one place (links to plugins, articles etc.) and a forum.

Better recognition of WordPress in Croatia

This was a heavy one. In Croatia, WordPress is usually considered a “blog engine”. This is because community was not–existent at the time. There was no one that can stand out and say that WordPress is one of the best CMS in the world with over 20% of the world wide web using it.

Since I was working with WordPress for many years, people approached me from time to time and asked me to help them. Sometimes I even acted as a consultant for some WordPress–based projects. This is good but it shouldn’t be a one–person job. We should build a professional community and we’re building it as we speak.

What is next?

After the Meetup we started a group that will help with the translation. Currently there are 9 people in the group.

We also want to create a standardized documentation. Every one of us is giving their clients their own documentation version (usually a document from 10 to 40 pages) in PDF format. Because we don’t have documentation in Croatian just yet we decided to create a document that will be used by everyone with the most used options in WordPress (how to write an article or a page, setup most common options etc.).

Connecting with WordPress communities in the region

Although we are usually refered to as Croatian WordPress community the fact is that we’re connected with Slovenian, Bosnian and Serbian communities as well. Bosnian and Serbian language have many similarities with Croatian so we can understand each other easy enough. Because of that we welcomed many of them in our Facebook group.

Slovenian WordPress community started their Meetup at approximately the same time we did ours. Both of our communities see this as a potential for exchanging speakers and knowledge and a possibility to build a stronger regional community.

As WordPress is changing the publishing world, all of us want to change the way WordPress is being experienced in our countries. This is done by helping our communities grow and be stronger. And by expecting even more professionalism in our work. We can do that, we’re on the right track.

Thanks

At the end of the article I would like to thank all the people that are responsible for bringing idea of a community into life.

Lucijan Blagonić and Zoran Ugrina did a lot of preparations for the WordPress Coffee and WordPress Meetup Zagreb. Ivan Percan helped us as well with organizational tasks.

Netokracija and Ivan Brezak Brkan helped us with media coverage and Plus Hosting (thanks Zvonimir Gembec) was kind enough to give us free domain and hosting for the community.

Tomislav Negulić from CARNet did a huge part of bringing CARNet and WordPress Croatia together. And again, thanks for the photos of the event.

Our first speakers: Jurica Zuanović, Tomaž Zaman, Goran Šerić and (again) Zoran Ugrina – without them first Meetup would not be such a blast.

Dear guests Per Esbensen from Copenhagen and Primož Cigler from Ljubljana.

And more and more people will be on this list in the future.

—

Since this article is more of a story than a report on the first WordPress Meetup, if you want to learn more about the Meetup and what happened there go to Tailored4WP blog and read a blog post there.

The post How to build a WordPress community? appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

Humans are the only entities where ego is observed apparently and up to variable extent in the state of consciousness dividing them further into egoistic, egotistic, egomaniac, etc.

When you’re young

Everyone has an ego. The real question is — is it under control and how expressed it is? Problem with ego is that you usually don’t see it as a problem. I certainly did not. Here is my story. At the age of 18 I started working on local television. This is (in my opinion at least) one of the biggest ego boosters there is. I started doing cover stories, news reports on politics, culture, sports — everything one local television needs. And yes, I flew so damn high.

When I look back from todays’ perspective I was terrible. I was an egomaniac. This lasted for 1–2 years before I realized how silly I was. Hey, I was working on a local television with a coverage of around 100k and viewership of maybe 10k (at best). So, I was basically nothing. Yes, I did interviewed some Croatian politicians (and even covered the presidential campaign when Stipe Mesić was elected president), I was there when we voted first Croatian social–democratic government and did several stories about it, I spoked with Miss Croatia (don’t remember the year anymore though), with actors, musicians, but then again — not many people were interested. Lesson learned — ego is a burden most of the time. I should stop being a dick. And with 20 years I’m certainly not the smartest person on the planet.

Designer ego (and how to overcome it)

But no, I couldn’t learn a lesson so fast. You are designers yourselves and you know about your own ego issues. Hey, if you nodded in negative manner than you have bigger problem than me. After I started working in web design industry my ego was under control most of the time. But at one point I thought I was so awesome that I shouldn’t work harder. And then I lost a prospective client. Afterward I’ve asked him what I did wrong and he said: “You did nothing wrong but you didn’t try hard enough. You have chosen the easy way and this wasn’t right”. Wow, I fucked up big time because I couldn’t see the larger perspective. And because of my ego I didn’t try hard enough. This is a common problem for young designers.

It’s difficult to see your own problems, but your ego will be a problem if you:

• are always right, no matter what anyone else tells you
• don’t think that your client can have smart suggestions
• quote design books you’ve read, all the time, everyday
• think that you’re the best designer in your city/region/country/world (you can’t be serious to think that you’re the best designer in the world!? o.O)

Yes, we all have an ego. I’ve chosen to be modest, think twice before I say anything (especially if that can hurt some else’s feelings), try to compete instead of being a dick.

Compete, not envy

I believe in competition. I don’t envy anyone. If a person or a company from my country succeeds I will be happy for them. If someone asks for help I’ll always try to help. I didn’t choose to have a large ego (which is rather difficult since I’m a control freak when it comes to writing code, designing, preparing Photoshop files and more) but I have chosen to compete with others.

Just look around and you will see people that can inspire you, companies that work hard to make it on the market. If you get inspired by them you won’t have time to think about how great you are. We’re not great. We can always do better.

Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way.

— Chris Lowe, Pet Shop Boys

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We all deal with different kinds of clients. Some are more and some are less organized. And even before you start building a website there is a problem you have to solve — content. When you work with large companies and corporations you have to deal with different parts of the company as well. If you have some luck (if this can be considered lucky at all) you will deal with a department called (pause, please) marketing department.

They usually have their own vision on how to organize website content — what is important and what is not. But, in most cases they are actually experts for print marketing and not the web. Web is somewhat different since we all try to focus on quality call to actions, microcopy and content cross–linking (among other things).

On the other hand if you deal with a smaller client they don’t have the necessary expertise to produce top quality content (in most cases). We usually try to help our clients with it and the first step is organizing it. Here is how we do it.

How to use Dropbox to organize your web sitemap

We used Dropbox for years and most of our clients use it as well. We love it for all kind of stuff (and not only content organization) but if you’d like, you can use some other online file sharing service.

First we start with building a sitemap. Every folder in Dropbox will become a page or a section.

Notice that every folder in the website root has a prefix–number. This is used to determine it’s position in the navigation. If it is not that important to you just leave it out. We usually create a folders for Home and News. These are empty folders since the home is defined in wireframes and the news are uploaded on–site. Nevertheless we realized this helps our clients not to get confused. You might also noticed a folder _notes. This is denoted with an underscore so it always shows first in the folder hierarchy and we use it for special production notes.

If you go a step further, for example you want to see what are the subpages for Jastrebarsko:

For every page that will have some static content we have this kind of structure:

•  _notes are used for general notes about the current page
• photos in this case are used for storing photos that will be used on the page. Depending on the page and it’s function it’s good to have a larger photo choice so don’t hesitate to ask your clients to pick few extra photos as well.
• for storing actual content (formatted) we usually use Microsoft Word. I know, some of you don’t like proprietary software and that’s ok. You can use Libre Office instead. On the other hand you could also try Google Docs instead of Dropbox.
• if there is something else (a file) that is needed to show the final page you can upload it in the current folder, but in every situation more files are needed I like to keep them organized into subfolder. It’s your choice.

SEO optimization

At some point you could choose to have a SEO expert come in to your project. They may be employed by either you or the client. In any case by using Dropbox it’s easy to add them in the shared folder and the only thing we suggest them to do is to add a SEO prefix to document name they’ve optimized. Some examples:

• instead About_Jastrebarsko.docx we will get SEO_About_Jastrebarsko.docx
• if you want to have more version–like control you can choose to prefix every filename with the date like this 2014-01-21–SEO_About_Jastrebarsko.docx

—

I hope that this tips will help you be more productive when working with clients. And remember — the best way to produce a quality website for your clients is to educate them in the process.

The post Using Dropbox to help clients organize their web sitemap appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

This is a personal post. If you’re the kind of a reader who is uncomfortable reading about personal stuff, now it’s a good moment to leave this article. For me, writing is relaxing. It’s a way to organize my thoughts…

Business decisions

In 2007. I started Extendis, my second company (and wrote about it on this blog). Although it was a difficult time for us since Jasenka was unemployed for 4 years and worked only part–time (occasionally) and with me between jobs it all started coming to pieces. I did some freelance work with interesting projects, learned a lot of new stuff, but unfortunately, neglected this blog. In 2010. my brother Lucijan and I started an agency – Blagonic Brothers. We were known for making quality work so working together seemed as a logical next step. The next 2 years were (looking backwards) the best 2 business years. We went to a lot of conferences, being faster with every new project, implementing new technologies along the way… We even started to speak at some local events.

At the end of 2011. we started employing people. It was a hell of a ride with ups & downs of running business in Croatia. Last year I co–founded first Croatian agency specialized in WordPress – Tailored Development, we launched our service Tailored4WP and started building Croatian WordPress community.

Personal life

In my personal life things started to look promising. In 2008. I’ve got married and in the next 2 years I visited many European cities like Budapest, Munich, Amsterdam, Bruxelles, Paris, Geneve, Zurich… But, there were problems. My wife and I couldn’t get a baby we wanted so much…

Toughest moment

So, from 2010. we went to several  clinics searching for two simple answers: “Why we can’t get a baby?” and “Is there a solution to our problem?”. The toughest moment I remember was one rainy day in Rijeka, when a doctor gave us negative diagnosis. We might never get a baby. Although this kind of news is not something you hear every day it was shocking to us and we certainly weren’t prepared to hear that.  Neverthless, we were determined and tried to stay positive in the process.

Everyday driving around 200km from Pula to Rijeka to take a medication and a test, then going back to work, managing a company with couple of people, managing clients and work and trying to stay in the deadlines. If I worked with you in those 2 years I’m sorry for every deadline missed. Wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Falling apart

I know I can take a lot of punches and tolerate whole lot of stress. But there is always a limit. For me, it was a day Lucijan and I held a lecture in front of (around) 100 people. Didn’t sleep well that night and in the morning I heard the news that we just lost “this small little bubble” (that’s how we used to call implanted embryos). We didn’t make it, again, in our journey. In the middle of a lecture – blackout. I simply couldn’t talk, had to sit down and relax. Fortunately enough, I managed to finish the lecture.

Happy moments

But life writes the most beautiful and unpredictable stories. The very next day I learned that from two babies, one little fighter survived the implantation process. That was the happiest moment of my life to that point. When Luka was about to be born we went to Rijeka again (so, basically Luka is “Fiuman” – those from Rijeka know the meaning;). I went to hospital and witnessed that moment. Those of you who have kids, you know what I’m talking about. It was magical.

Life is unpredictable

And once again – life was unpredictable. During this couple of years while we went to all kinds of psychological stress – this left so many scars on our relationship. From a relationship that can withstand anything we’ve gone to divorce. It’s sad in fact, after all we’ve gone through together, with money problems, with problems getting baby, with business problems – that we separated once our dreams came true. But that is life. You never know what awaits you around the corner. And because of that you should always live every day as it is your last. I had a lot of beautiful days in this past 10 years. In the last year alone with Luka I have a lot of memories, good memories.

And the life goes on. We should embrace it with our arms open. Always give more than expected, do your best. And even then, there is no certainty what will happen next. Sure, you can loose a lot but then again – if you never even tried how can you make a mistake?

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

— Albert Einstein

The post Six Years appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

The post Happy holidays appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

We created some great work at Omnicron and it will be difficult to start over again, but it seems that it is in my spirit to always look forward and search for something new. We all put a lot of effort so that Omnicron stands where it stands today — as one of the best web development companies in Istra.

But as I said — the time has come to move on and I’m really looking forward to new business opportunities that are awaiting me. All this time I had full support from my girlfriend and my true love Jasenka who always believed in me and some of this would never be happening otherwise (thank you for that ;).

In Extendis we will focus on creating some nice CSS-based layouts, graphic work (logos, stationery, visual identity …) and new media services, but we will never look away when something like PHP development knocks at our door. My main motto and the motto of Extendis will be to introduce innovation. If you have a job that is inspiring and demanding than we want to hear you!

So, if you would like to take a quick preview of what are we going to do, you can watch our showreel here at EmanuelBlagonic.com and for a high quality version visit Extendis.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Win a custom WordPress template

If you’d like, you can participate in a contest at Extendis Blog and win a free custom WordPress template.

The post Moving on appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

I personally love XHTML and CSS combination even when we should achieve the same effect with Flash. This is partly because I never explored Flash so much. The client of ours — Oxy Polyclinic wanted for us to create a map of diving locations for their Ship “Borna”. We could create a map by using Flash, but we used simple XHTML and CSS instead. Why?

Well, one of the reasons, and not a small one was that we wanted to have links that can be followed by search engines. If we used Flash, the links inside Flash movie couldn’t be followed. The other reason was that we wanted the map to be viewed by as many visitors that shouldn’t be bothered with installing Flash plug-in. We know that today most users have Flash installed, but then, if we don’t care about those who haven’t, why should we bother with any other browser except Firefox and Internet Explorer?

The code

The code is very simple. The two differences you will notice from the previous article are: we used CLASS selectors on list-items. We used classes because we had two different diving locations to show, and by using classes we could style them differently. The second change is that we added a text that will be hidden until we went over him with a mouse. Let’s start.

<div id="map">
<ul id="locations">
<li class="ship" id="ship1"><a href="#" title="Coreolanus"><span>Coreolanus</span></a></li>
<li class="dive" id="dive1"><a href="#" title="Banjol Island"><span>Banjol Island</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>

CSS behind the code

We have one DIV that we use as a container for our map. This is here because on Diving Borna web site we used the CSS map functionality elsewhere, for example to show the ships layout. So, in this first DIV we define the width and height of it, and we load the background image.

#map {
	width:350px;
	height:400px;
	background:url(istra-map.gif) no-repeat;
}

Next, we should define the list itself. Naturally, we don’t want to display the bullets. Also, we positioned the list relatively. It is very important not to forget this, because we will position the links absolutely to it. We should also reset the margin and padding values. If you don’t do this, you will have problems in Internet Explorer (unless you solved it by applying some other reset method).

#locations {
	list-style:none;
	position:relative;
	margin:0;
	padding:0;
}

Next, we will style the links. Every location is represented by different image (sunken ship uses light green, and dive location uses light blue). Because we wanted to make as few HTTP requests as possible, we created one image that contains icons for all the states (sunken ship, dive location, hover and selected state and already visited). Every icon is 10x10px and because of that we gave our link the same width and height values. Because every location is in different position, the links will be positioned absolutely.

#locations a {
	width:10px;
	height:10px;
	display:block;
	position:absolute;
}

Now it’s time to style the different diving locations. Every diving location is different and we know which one it is by different classes. We have two of them (ship and dive). Depending on a class, the link is styled differently and the background image is moved accordingly.

#locations .dive a 	{ background:url(icons.gif) no-repeat 0 0 }
#locations .ship a 	{ background:url(icons.gif) no-repeat -20px 0 }

We used the same approach for :hover, .selected and :visited states. If the mouse is over a link or the link is selected (we are currently viewing the diving location) the background-image is moved -40px to the left. If the link is already visited the image is moved -60px.

#locations .ship a:hover,
#locations .dive a:hover,
#locations a.selected { background:url(icons.gif) no-repeat -40px 0 }
#locations a:visited { background:url(icons.gif) no-repeat -60px 0  }

After we styled the links, we have to style the text. Now, if you just want to use some kind of simple text or an image, you don’t have to use SPAN for displaying text (take a look at the past article). But I used SPAN so I can hide the text until we came across it with the mouse. The text is hidden with #locations a span { display:none }, and it pops-up when the mouse is over a link with #locations a:hover span { display:block }.

The rest of the code is pretty easy to understand. We positioned the text relatively to the link (which is, BTW, positioned absolutely) just in case we want it a bit removed from the link (like I did in this example). We also defined the size and weight of the font, color and line-height. We made a box around the text by defining the background color and width and height of the SPAN. Text is a bit removed from the borders with padding. The opacity is defined just to make a box transparent (at least under Firefox, it looks cool :). You could use the Alpha filter if you want to achieve the same effect under IE.

#locations a span {display:none; }

#locations a:hover span { 
	display:block;
	position:relative;
	top:-5px;
	left:15px;
	font-size:1.1em;
	font-weight:bold;
	color:#CCC;
	line-height:15px;
	width:150px;
	height:30px;
	padding:2px 5px;
	background:#333;
	opacity:.7;
} 

Now, what is left is to position the links to its positions. By observing the code you will see that we used both ID and CLASS selectors on list-items. The ID selector is used for positioning the link to its position. Since the ID selector should be used to identify one element (at least if you want to validate a page), we used ID for positioning since every location is unique. Here is the sample code for this.

#ship1 a { top:70px; left:5px }
#dive1 a { top:125px; left:20px }

It seems that we did everything we could, but in the testing process I discovered a strange bug that bothered me both on Firefox and IE.

Some diving locations were visible even when the mouse was over other location, and that just wasn’t very nice. I solved the problem by defining the z-index:1 for a and a.selected and z-index:1000 for a:hover.

#locations a, #locations a.selected { z-index:1 }
#locations a:hover { z-index:1000 }

Take a look at example and live version

Example
Live version @ DivingBorna.com

Please note: Since the live version went live a few months ago, I made some slight changes in this article. If you would like to use this kind of approach for creating CSS Maps, you should always consider this article instead of live version. Live version is here only to demonstrate the possibilities behind this kind of approach.

The post CSS map in practice appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

How many times you wanted to create cool product box for some of your products? Sure, there are many ways, and with new Photoshop you have even more options to create boxes. But I wanted to show you how to create a “3D look box” in the 2D environment using Photoshop paths.

Where to start?

First, create an empty image in Photoshop. I created one 800px wide and 600px long. Now, we will create the guides like on the picture below. I moved the ruler to the first top position for easier viewing. We will create guides for the back (50x300px) and front side (150x300px). Now, create the horizontal guides on 10px, 20px, 280px and 290px. OK? Let’s move on.

Use the Rectangle Tool (U) to create the front and back box with the above values. Now, use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to move the point of the back and front sides like this: 0,0>0,10px, 0,300>0,290px for the back side and 200,0>200,20px, 200,300>200,380px.

You did this? You should now have something similar to the box on this picture.

Now, import your footage. I made my front side a little wider but with these values you should experiment on your own. My footage is as you can see 50x300px back and 200x300px front. If you are doing this for the first time, forget the writing on box and experiment with the pictures instead :)

Here is the magical part :). Select the first rectangle you created (to do this use your mouse, hold down the CTRL key (or COMMAND key) while clicking on the layer representing the rectangle (Shape1).

Now, use Edit > Paste Into (or SHIFT + CONTROL/COMMAND + V) to paste into the rectangle. Use Transform (CTRL/COMMAND + T) to transform the front and back side footage to move it to the place.

If you are new to this you might want to move your points to the position manually, but here is how I did that. First, move the right part to the right guideline, then click with your mouse on the top right corner (for the front side, off course). While holding your mouse, use the combination SHIFT+CTRL+ALT and move the right corner slightly down, really slow. If you did everything as mentioned, the bottom corner will move to the center as well. You should get something like this.

The last thing we want to do is to create some inner shadows for both sides (40% opacity, 0px distance, 20px size). You can also select both sides and create a white background in back of them. Now, apply the Drop Shadow to the layer with these values: 10% opacity, 10px distance, and 20px size. I also added an outside stroke with the width of 1px, white, to the same layer. Here is what it looks like.

You should try to experiment for yourself now :)!

The post How to use Photoshop to create Product Box? appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

I realized if Google used web standards, than this would be a giant boost to the web standards community (which is, by the way, getting more important every day). What is the benefit to Google? What if I said to you that by using web standards Google could save up to 25% of the HTML file size?

Just a quick note

I wrote this article a few months ago, when I did a research on how would Google benefit from using web standards. I meant to show the final code and look of the page, but in the process I realized that I should read carefully the Google Brand permission of use. So, with this on, I couldn’t use the Google imagery as I wanted to show you how the “new” homepage would look like. Well, I used it for the research purposes when I recreated a homepage and result page, but not for public. What you can read in this article is what learned from implementing standards compliant homepage and result page to Google. Enjoy.

What are web standards?

You have most certainly read about web standards. By using the combination of XHTML and CSS we are separating content from presentation elements. So, how can we popularize XHTML and CSS and how will the people — both the readers and creators of web pages — benefit from implementing this into their webs?

The situation here is not so bright. There is a movement that is strongly for web standards and the other that is opposite. In my opinion, there is no alternative in creating a standards compliant page. By using it you are promoting accessibility (page is viewed on many Internet devices), usability (fonts are scalable, there are options for quickly changing the contrast and look and feel of the page), and helping yourself developing web sites more quickly and with reduced cost.

I decided to make a test wondering how Google would benefit from using web standards. I considered if I could make a homepage and search page that has less size (which means it consumes less bandwidth), that has cleaner code which could be changed easier with CSS, than this would obviously mean there is a prospect in it.

Old VS new

Google is mainly using tables for shaping the content of their pages. But today, we can use structural tags like divisions (DIV) for creating placeholders for content or spans (SPAN) for shaping the content furthermore. For displaying results we could use unordered or ordered lists and every result could become a list-item.

I used a modern web structure to re-create a Google homepage and search results page. I wanted to separate data from styling. My other task was to clean up the code and to use classes to re-use some elements in the page structure. This is best seen in displaying results. Google uses this structure:

Instead of this, I’m using this one:

• Title of the web page
  Description of the page …
  www.link-to-your-page.com/ – 42k – Cached – Similar pages

What has changed? First of all (it looks prettier :), I used unordered list to display results. In this case list is behaving like placeholder for the results (in our case list-items). Instead of Heading 2 for displaying the title of the web page in results, I used so I could style the title. I could also used Heading 2 or even Heading 3, but I used Heading 2 for displaying the name of the generated search (in our case we are just searching the web) which is displayed on a blue background on top of the results.

I decided that description won’t need its own SPAN so it is a part of the list-item itselft. For displaying the text that shows the link to the page you are trying to reach I used and this also reflects to the last two links — Cached and Similar pages.

With the CSS I styled the class="title" to show the larger font and class="link" to show different link color than the rest of the page.

The challenge behind the job

There were quite many challenges when redesigning any web page including Google. The first one was how to create a home page, and how to position the elements. Search field had to be centered, but the Advanced Search, Preferences and Language Tools link had to be on the right side of it. Now, they are using tables for that, but I wanted to position the links relatively to the form. This is OK, but when I tried to enlarge the fonts, the links were on top of the search field and search button. The max-width:351px solved that.

The second one was how to recreate the paging on the bottom of the results page. The idea behind the paging is that you can click both on the number and on the “O” letter in the Google logo. This looks great and I used unordered list for that. To each list item I gave the fixed width and a top padding that would shift the number on the bottom. With the background positioning I positioned the image depending on the class of the number (if a number is selected I moved the image so the red letter would show up) or the .start and .end classes for the first and last list-item.

Final challenge was how the page will look in different version of Internet browsers. I tested this one in Firefox and IE and I tried to enlarge the text up to 3 times. I had no problem with Internet explorer when enlarging text, but with Firefox I had a problem with the extra links on the right of the search area. I “fixed” this by using CSS-property max-width that will limit the search field to 351px. Second thing I noticed was the problem in IE that for some reason didn’t position the links where they should be. I used different value for IE with conditional comments.

Test results

As I finished the work on the homepage and result page, I took the time to calculate how much KB was saved in the process. In the case of the homepage, we’ve saved almost 1 KB (4,61 KB before, 3,73 KB after), while in the search result page we’ve saved 2 KB (18,2 KB before, 16,3 KB after). This doesn’t seem much, but you should now that I didn’t use any other saving method (like optimizing CSS or the HTML code). What I did is — I used a different syntax to achieve the same thing (i.e. Google used classes for links, and I removed that. I used instead these code to achieve the same thing #main a {...})

You can explore test files here (no images included at this point).
Homepage – Search result page

The conclusion

When talking about web standards, we are almost always taking as advantage that use of web standards produces cleaner and better code. Is there a better place to test the use of web standards than search engines? Should Google use web standards?

I think it should, and it will most certainly be a giant challenge for whoever will work on that. Not just because they can save at least 1 GB of bandwidth on 1 million homepage loads, but because it will be a giant wind in the back of web standards community and it would clearly state – Web standards SHOULD BE USED, BECAUSE THEY HELP TO CREATE A BETTER WEB!

Research parameters

In order to truly recreate the Google homepage and search result page, I used the same links (not the "#" sign) as in the original document. I also used the Google code whenever possible (if not for design purposes), to get the most precise result.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this topic :)

The post Would Google benefit from using web standards? appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

Doing that I found some tips (rather than techniques) very useful in the process. So, let’s get immediately to the matter.

Do you get lost in your XHTML code?

I got lost numerous times, so I figured out how to mark various elements of my code. I tried different approaches, but this one seemed best.

<!-- HEADER -->

<!-- /HEADER -->

So, from know on, I am commenting the start point of the element (i.e. “header”) with an comment and I’m finishing with one as well. This is more than helpful when I want to move the elements such as Contact information from one part of the page to the other. I just select it from <!-- CONTACT INFORMATION --> to the <!-- /CONTACT INFORMATION -->. I suggest you use this kind of “semantic”, because this way, you won’t get confused.

What about CSS?

Well, it is good to use CSS comments /* */ to write which part of the document you are in (i.e. /* HEADER NAVIGATION */). You can find a very good article on how to find sections of your CSS code at StopDesign.

Personally, I prefer to name my section with two and more words describing it, but these tips are also great.

The second thing you should do is group your CSS rules. I prefer to group them like this:

1. Ungrouped styles – I use Global white space reset and also I like to apply different styles to the Body element (main color, background, font and text align).
2. Logo – After that, I’m usually grouping the styles to show H1 as a logo.
3. Main elements — Here, I’m grouping all the textual elements (H2, H3, H4, P ….) and even tables and lists. I noticed that it is best to use margin-bottom:value to remove the elements one from another, and here I also like to group this style for all the elements that should be removed from each other (i.e. h2, h3, h4, p, table, #content ul { margin-bottom:10px }). You could also use this area to group different aspects of the textual elements like colors, line-height etc. (i.e. p, #content li { color:#777; line-height:1.7em; font-size:1.3em }). It is important for you not to apply rules to the elements that are called elsewhere like list-items, so it is a good practice to apply the styles to the specific elements (#content li { ... }).
4. Links — After main elements you should redefine the links. For me, this is the natural order, but after all — you should find what suits you best.
5. Main structure — After the main elements are already defined, I usually define the structural elements like #container { width:770px; margin: 0 auto } or #content { float:left; width:400px; text-align:left }.
6. Other elements – With the first 5 steps we’ve defined all the main elements in the page. For me, there is no specific position for the other styles. You should position them whatever suits you. But you should also take into consideration the position of the elements in the page structure (i.e. if you have a navigation in header, then you should put the “header navigation” styles before the footer styles.)

I hope you found these tips useful. If you have something to share with us, please do so :).

Further reading

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding from Smashing Magazine

The post A few CSS and XHTML tips for web developers appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

If you use some kind of CMS or your own news script, you can the solution explained in this article. I will show you how to create an image gallery that doesn’t falls apart when different sizes of images are loaded and with no images being distorted.

What are we supposed to do?

We are assuming that our clients have unequal computer skills. They know how to upload a photo, but they don’t like the idea of using a program to prepare it for the web (i.e. make the pictures of same dimensions). So what should we do? If we want to create an image gallery using one of standard techniques, the gallery will fall apart on the picture that is higher than the rest.

I came up with an idea to create an image gallery that will crop the images, so if the image is larger than specified proportions, the overlay won’t be visible. This way, we will create an image gallery that rocks with all the modern and nice things we all use these days :)

The theory

We will create two DIVs that will “contain” the image inside it. This is the code we will be using:

You could use only one DIV if you just want to “crop” the image, but I used two instead, so I could create a border around the image that will be 1px outside the image. I used the link so you could link the image with some external big image of your own. You could use just the two DIVs and an image if you’d like — that’s up to you. Let’s style this gallery, shall we?

Styling the images

First of the two DIVs you have for any of your images should have a class. We gave ours class="image". This way you can control the behavior of image gallery and any of the images in it. So, you should decide which width and height you want to use in your gallery. I used the size of 80px for this, so I gave it this width and height. I also gave it a border of 1px. Since I want my images to be apart one from another 10px I used margins (right and bottom) of that value. We also used float:left so our images are aligned to the left. Don’t forget to use position:relative. Without it, we cannot remove the border from the image.

.image {
	width:80px;
	height:80px;
	border:1px solid #CCC;
	float:left;
	margin-right:10px;
	margin-bottom:10px;
	position:relative;
}

OK. And now is time for a little CSS Magic. We added second DIV to “crop” the images. We will do that by using overflow:hidden at this point — everything outside this DIV won’t be visible. We gave this DIV a smaller width and height (i.e. 1px right and 1px left = 2px) because we wanted to “remove” the border from the image for 1px. If we didn’t want to remove a border, or we just wanted to use plain and simple border or no border at all, than we could put the overflow:hidden to the first DIV instead.

Now, as we wanted to move the border away from the image, we positioned this second DIV absolutely. This is possible because we positioned the first DIV relatively.

.image div {
	width:78px;
	height:78px;
	overflow:hidden;
	position:absolute;
	top:1px;
	left:1px;
}

For the last part, we removed the border from the image itself with (obviously) .image img { border:none; }.

The example

Take a look at the example.

Eventual problems

As far as I tested this image gallery on different settings, it works fine, but there is something you should take care of. If you are using some kind of PHP resize script that resizes the image on the fly, you should arrange that both X and Y axis of the image doesn’t exceed the size of the actual “cropped” thumb, or you will finish with the white space on the bottom or in the right of the picture.

If you have any questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to make a comment.

The post Image gallery that doesn’t fall apart appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

It is easy when you design a static page, but there are many obstacles, difficulties and limitations when you design for Content Management Systems. This is like a coin — it has two sides. I personally love the challenge that this kind of work puts in front of me, but nevertheless it is exhausting and sometimes painful.

In this article I will try to show you how to overcome some of the difficulties that will eventually come up when you design a page that is supposed to be edited by different people with different level of HTML knowledge.

There are two kinds of users

First, there are users that don’t know anything of web design, HTML and CSS. Those users didn’t hear about validation and it means nothing to them — just the opposite — they don’t understand why the validation is important and how this helps them (but this is not an article about validation :-). They may also like green text on white background. Tough one.

Second type of users is those who know what to do. They may or may not know the HTML, but if you give them opportunity to explore, they could ruin your masterpiece.

Validation errors

We could talk about how validation is important, but I will not discuss it here in this article. I love validation and I think it is very useful both when developing web site and later when you use it. So, how to prevent the page from not validating?

It is not an easy task if your page is maintained by users who don’t understand code syntax. The solution is rather easy to implement. You should use WYSIWYG editors in your administration whenever possible. It is also a good idea to disable all non essential options in the editor.

It is the habit of your users to use as many options as available, so limit the options to most common ones (headings, paragraphs, bold, italic, underline, lists, tables). If you allow them to input images into the editor, you should limit the image width to the maximum width of the layout DIV the image will go into.

Remember to use an editor that will create a code that validates. One of the best editors out there is TinyMCE and it’s free.

Page doesn’t look so nice anymore

OK, you used WYSIWYG editor on your CMS administration, and now what? You got pages that are all messed up, floats are not working correctly, and everything is upside down. First of all, use fixed width DIVS and overflow:hidden whenever possible for layout. This way you prevent your page from falling apart in cases like when your users upload very big images, or create tables that just don’t fit in. This is better than scrambled page.

The next thing you can do is to define maximum sizes of images and tables in your CSS (i.e. #content img { width:200px } — this piece of CSS resizes the image within #content DIV). This works well for images (browser will resize the image to fit proportions defined in CSS), but you should know that CSS cannot resize the image using constrain proportions, unless the size of the image is strictly defined and you can define smaller proportions with CSS (i.e. #content img { width:160px; height:120px; } — this will create a resized image from 800x600px). This won’t work for tables though, because browser renders table with the data there is already present. So if there is many data in the table, it will go beyond your desired and predicted space.

Remember to style the code

Because of CSS, there are many possibilities to style the code once the browser requests the page. Remember to style the code and you could even differently style the headings, paragraphs, images or tables in the section that is edited by others via CMS.

This way you can recreate a “static view” of the page that is not manually edited, and make a page look more professional.

The post Designing a Content Management System driven website appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.

As you may know, I live in a small Croatian region called Istra. Istra is well known as a tourist destination, cultural heritage including many ancient Roman monuments, cuisine and natural beauty. In Istria people are speaking a mixture of Croatian and 6 local dialects.

Istrian dictionary is a project from well known local publisher Histria Croatica — C.A.S.H. (famous by the series of books with great design and photography, describing Istrian past, monuments, tourism and people).

The aim was to take from the past our dialect words, to remember how they were spoken and what do they mean. We wanted to preserve a part of us while preserving the local vocabulary.

From September until know, we at Omnicron developed both front-end and back-end user and security interface, which allows a few levels of protection. The administration itself is built with the idea of user with administration permissions who has the authorization to create, edit and delete users and their privileges.

The whole site was built with the idea of users collaborating on entering new dialect words, suggesting the meanings of different words, and the administration area in which the administrators (depending on their permissions) can allow or deny different words, sort them and change them accordingly.

The administration interface is designed to take advantage of large screen resolutions. It has liquid layout, multi-selection usability which allows the administrator to make multiple tasks at the same time and numerous sorting and filtering methods. Nevertheless, the administration will work fine on lower resolutions as well in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

In the upcoming years, when the database will be complete with words, the idea is to print the Istrian dictionary as a book. This way, all the contributors will have their place in a book what is, in my opinion the best cooperation between the Web as a media in one side, and the printed media in the other.

Visit Istrian dictionary, and take just a little breath of past. Although this is a Croatian site, you may find its design interesting.

The post Istrian dictionary appeared first on Emanuel Blagonic.