Jay George

I’ve always found the WordPress admin bar a bit annoying. It can definitely be handy for editing pages while browsing (clicking the edit button on the admin bar is easier than trying to find it in the admin area). Whilst it has its uses however, I tend to turn it off by going to Users / Profile / then un-ticking the ‘Show Toolbar’ check box. I’ve seen tricks for moving the Toolbar to the bottom of the page, which is better because the toolbar is less obtrusive… but it still annoys me because it gets in the way of experiencing the site. The other problem of moving the toolbar around is that you have to keep track of how WordPress … Continue reading →

If you’re already up and running with Responsive Design (RWD), what’s the next step? At first, I was pretty happy with the way RWD solved the problem layout on different sized devices. However, with the accelerated growth of mobile devices + high-resolution screens we’ve got another problem on our hands – serving whopping high-resolution images by default to all devices. Now if we’re serving the images via CSS, this isn’t a problem; we use our default stylesheet to serve standard resolution images to mobile devices, and then we might decide to swap the image out for a larger version on bigger screens or higher resolution devices, using Media Queries. The problem really arrives when we’re looking to serve images within … Continue reading →

Hey Guys,

It’s been a good few months before I’ve posted anything, mainly because I have a new job and client work is taking up all my evenings. I still have to edit out my ums and ars quite a bit before I can publish a video unfortunately so I can’t quickly publish as I’d like.

I thought I’d write some really short posts for now instead, seen as I’m learning of tonne of new stuff.

Here is a way to finely target IE to your heart’s content in WordPress (but you could easily adapt for plain HTML). Continue reading →

Finding the Build Script Hard Work? The scope of the HTML5 Boilerplate by Paul Irish and the team is pretty big. In fact, they seem self-aware of this, sending a questionnaire to their users, trying to figure out which parts of the project people use or don’t use. Here are the results. Part of the Boilerplate is a tool called the Build Script; a script that runs in Terminal that essentially speeds up your website through compressing your code and images, forcing visitor’s browsers to cache everything, and probably some other wizardry that I can’t fathom.

My previous video about Dropbox and MAMP was about hacking around ‘old-style’ thinking where MAMP stubbornly stores SQL databases in a single place, meaning that to work on multiple computers we have to use a third party tool to force our data into Dropbox. With the announcement of Google Chromebooks, here is an approach that is the complete opposite. We don’t have to force local data on to the web because all our data lives on the web.

I realise that there are quite a few tutorials out there that show you how to set up MAMP on your Mac, take this great video series by Chris Coyier for example – First Moments with MAMP, but since these days there a few people that DON’T design on multiple computers, I set about trying to figure out a way to synchronise my local WordPress databases with across multiple computers with Dropbox, every web designer’s favourite syncing service. I found a great article on a blog called StuckTogetherWithTape on how to do this and I’ll walk you through this method in the video. Even if you don’t work on multiple computers you should do this for backup purposes anyway, just … Continue reading →

Getting your head around the Build Script and adapting it for WordPress can take a bit of time, but there’s more! Trying to figure out the best way to publish everything can be a bit of a head-scratcher. I was pretty upset that publishing the Build Script broke my previous workflow using Espresso’s built-in FTP, and eventually had to resort to FileZilla, a self-contained FTP program, to get things working smoothly. But once you tweak it a bit, publishing your Build-Scripted WordPress theme becomes a snip! Filezilla is a free FTP program available on Mac and Windows, you can download it here. Here are the filter configurations I talk about in the video:

In part 2 of the HTML5 Build Script + WordPress tutorial we’ll go through the changes we need to make to the build script so that it works nicely with WordPress. It’s actually not too taxing, but there are a few gotcha’s. If you want to jump straight to the code there’s a link below to my blank WordPress theme, based on Starkers by Elliot Jay Stocks, but with added HTML5 Boilerscript stuff + a working Build Script. HTML5 Boilerplate WordPress Theme with Build Script N.B. I’ve made a few tweaks here and there, for example I’ve included Ryan Fait’s Sticky Footer, Andy Clarke’s 320 and up principle for CSS3 Media queries, etc. Feel free to strip these out – … Continue reading →

Firstly if you’re a serious web designer, or have ambitions to be a serious web designer, you should be checking out HTML5 Boilerplate right now (www.html5boilerplate.com). The idea of the HTML5 Boilerplate is to provide a starting point for future-proof web design. From putting javascript at the bottom of the page to using Modernizr, this is a collection of best practices from some notable people in the web industry and we really need to be aware of these basic fundamentals. However, basic Boilerplate aside my next two videos will specifically focus on the ‘Build Script’, a feature fully realised in version 1.0 of HTML5 Boilerplate. The idea of the Build Script is to always serve your code compressed, and always … Continue reading →