It’s been an exciting but rough few months since that time. Turns out I was fairly spot on when it came to my critique as I have noticed a substantial drop off of new project enquires when compared to previous months among various other metrics. Hey we all make mistakes, at least I am willing to make them on my own dime rather than on that of my clients. It’s been a bit rough to hold myself back from moving too hastily in this current redesign we are working on for the simple reason that I know it needs a change. But I have managed to make the time and hold myself back, do this properly.

The process itself has led to quite a few interesting discoveries and new plans for the future of Papertree. What it has become is not only a site redesign but more of a total rebrand that will allow Papertree to progress into the year ahead.

For now I will have to continue to wait while it goes through some of the final checks and developments but here are a few sneak peak screenshots for your enjoyment.

WordPress 2.8.5, titled a “hardening release” has been released and is recommended as an upgrade. Please see the official blog post on WordPress.org for more information.

That is all.

First off, after some client review I got the green light to go ahead and publish their new online home. Very happy with the end result here and will be sure to write more on this in the days to come. For now you can check it out at SEOinhouse.com.

Secondly I stumbled on this beautiful site that was built on the Charlene Theme, http://www.swiff.se/. Really motivating to see something like that, pushes me not only to look back at the theme and see what I can improve but also to finish up some of the other theme projects I have been working on. So thank you to them and beautiful work!

I also had a chance to jump a bit deeper into WordPress 2.9 over the week in my down time. Pretty exciting looking forward to the release. You can check my first post on the topic here.

Lastly I decided to download the iphone SDK and get cracking with the education. So far I have gotten through the basics and now have an app that says Hello.

Enjoy the weekend!

For one I think the new image editing capabilities will solve more problems for my clients than they will create, I hope cross your fingers. While it will probably take a bit of coaching and some good documentation, it will hopefully start to eliminate some of the unsightly things I have seen done with post image inserts. I also think it will be slightly less confusing to explain this process to a client over explaining to them that they need to open up their image editor and crop it to a certain number of pixels.

The second feature I am pretty excited about is the ability to add thumbnails similar to what you would see on magazine themes in particular. No outside scripts and only a minor bit of php. The thumbnail has been available, now WordPress has given us a way to add it fairly easily.

Check out this article for further info New feature in WordPress 2.9 – the_post_image()

I also see these new additions adding some interesting capabilities to the themes we develop. We shall see what happens, all in all I think these additions are welcome.

Time to get back to dabbling.

I recently came across a theme which to be completely honest was extremely confusing and I thought I had seen it all at this point. It’s not that it wasn’t structurally sound. There was some thought put into the front end of the site, at least it was logical. The confusion started when you dove into the backend and had a look at the options, the very controls that some theme authors put into place in order to make the life of the end user just a tad easier. There were so many options here it was overwhelming, but it wasn’t just the number of options alone.

Rather than focusing on what might actually be useful to the end user I believe the developer set out with one thought in mind. I am going to develop a theme. Since all of the themes that get attention these days come with options I need to have options to make this good. So I’ll surprise them. Here’s an option for everything!”

Two things really irked me here.

1. I couldn’t seem to figure out a reason for adding so many “down to the pixel” options in this theme with no apparent reason other than to say “look at me I have options”. It was confusing and overwhelming as I stated above and I deal with WordPress on a daily, imagine how your typical user would feel upon installation.
2. Second thing, and I think this is the one that really got me. There was no logical layout or sequence to the options. Sure they were organized in subheadings which for the most part made sense but once you got past that point it was an array of things you could choose to control, some of which I would see no reason for and others which made some sense. If you are going to add options to a theme, at least take the time to think about how the end user is going to interact with these options, what are the logical steps that they will take when setting up the theme. Think about form or navigation design, there is a natural sense of order that you try to follow, something that the end user is familiar with or becomes familiar with rather quickly.

   As I dug deeper the confusion worsened. While it seemed that you could control everything under the sun, there where little things that seemed quite a bit more useful and obvious that had been left out. The kicker was, in order to use some of the options in a particular manner you needed to tackle these little things first. Which meant digging into the code anyway. Kind of starts to defeat the purpose.

Personally I tend to go with minimal options. I think about the actions almost all users will take when setting up a theme. The basics, things like stats tracking codes, feedburner url’s etc. Things that might change often, for example a client would like to include a daily quote of their choosing. I have to possible routes of action here, I build in a widget area in which they can easily insert a text widget or I include a text area in the options panel. Simple and non confusing.

I will say this There are themes out there that contain quite a few options, giving a novice end user quite a bit of control over both the basics and the design. The thing that sets these themes apart is the fact that the developer has obviously put careful thought into which options make sense to include and the logical manner in which they are presented to the user. These themes with all of their options in tow can be set up by a novice user with only little more time spent when compared to your average theme, sans options. These themes are doing it right.

As for the theme mentioned above, it seems to me that if an end user does in fact end up having to search out support in order to figure out all of the options you are presenting them with, that the purpose of including those options has been defeated entirely.

I suppose this is more of a rant but I would be interested to hear your experiences with theme options and your opinion on their usefulness.

Keeping all of the quality factors on the same playing field and adjusting for the obvious overhead costs that come with a small/medium size design agency, should there be such a large gap in the pricing? What have we done as a whole to lead clients to expect such a large gap?

Interesting and thought provoking article that needs to be put on your “to read” list.

Something’s rotten in the state of freelance graphic design

Solution: Navigate to Settings/Miscellaneous and have a look at the first entry “Store uploads in this folder”. Note that it mentions in italics, Default is wp-content/uploads. In most installations and unless you have specified an alternate path this is what it is set to. In several instances, upon host transfer mentioned above I have encountered the default being reset to the full path to wp-cotent/uploads, meaning you will see quite a bit more than what they recommend as the default. If you reset this to the recommended default or the alternate path you have previously specified, your issues should clear and everything should return to normal.

Be advised, this is not a solution for every case. I have experienced it to be the problem in many cases and would recommend it as a good starting point from which to begin troubleshooting should you experience similar issues. As always, when in doubt contact a developer to make any changes you are not sure of.

Link to article: The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing

Additional reading on the subject.

• Unfolding the Fold
• Blasting the myth of the fold
• Staying Above the Fold in Web Design

What do you think?

I do however have 5 invites to hand out so you can try it out for yourself. Leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter @jeremyjames and I will be more than happy to set you up with one.

(I do have plans for a future version of this site using Typekit, hmm)

If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers

Hmm, wait a second maybe it threw fuel on the fire and even got me a bit irritated. Now I am undecided.

Either way, enjoy!