Comments on: Learn more about my site

By: iaan

iaan — Sat, 14 May 2011 14:24:50 +0000

Hi Natalie

The images are on Christine’s server, and yes, loads of traffic and images leads to high band-with. You need to make sure that your images are compressed and resized for your website so it will not be any bigger than needed.

Also make sure that you don’t just add images to add as much as possible, but only as much as needed.

Hope that helps?

By: Natalie

Natalie — Wed, 11 May 2011 08:50:03 +0000

Hi Iaan,
What do you suggest with saving bandwidth when displaying numerous photos on Christine’s site. I am currently having the problem of when displaying my photos I am taking up so much disk storage space and bandwidth. Is Christine’s photos plugged in from another source i.e. flickr? or do you upload via media in the backend at a very small web size? (Which is what I am currently doing?) Any suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks!

By: iaan

iaan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:40:35 +0000

Hi Gerrit. Thanks for the kind words. We love what we do – it’s great if it shows in the work ;-)

There are a variety of dynamic font replacement techniques available with various methods of implementing.

1) SIFR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement)

2) Cufon
(http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon/about)

3) Typekit
(http://typekit.com/)

A comparison of the pros / cons of these technologies are way beyond the scope of this comment. There are merits in all three.

We opted for a SIFR WordPress plugin which actually worked quite well and was a breeze to implement (only needing very basic HTML/CSS knowledge)

Let me know where you try it out – always interesting to see how people implement these techniques!

By: Gerrit

Gerrit — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:52:41 +0000

Could you please explain the dynamic font technology you mention? Is it a plugin and how do you tweak and tune this?

Love the site, Christine and Iaan, you’re both very good at what you do and it’s a pleasure looking at these works of art.

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:10:58 +0000

Thanks Iaan. Yes, I think we are wandering into very technical territory here! I’ll drop you an email Iaan.

So far as videos go, perhaps some discussion on the social networking features. I know everybody is doing it but how has it helped. I don’t quite get it!

By: iaan

iaan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:59:47 +0000

That might be a little bit beyond the scope of christines site, but send me an email or tweet me and I’ll gladly give you a quick rundown on page templates.

As I mentioned, this site uses many templates which might not be required by everyone.

Anything else to cover in a subsequent video?

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:57:40 +0000

Not really sure what templates I would need. I guess that is where I need to understand the structure and how to pull the various parts of the page (header.php, footer.php etc) together to generate the page via the template.

Perhaps you could go over something like the homepage template which is vastly different to the others and the about me template?

By: iaan

iaan — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:07:17 +0000

I could briefly explain page templates – not that hard to create. But to maximize their abilities some more advanced PHP skills are needed. (Or a Theme that already has all the functionality required for a specific page)

What type of page templates might you need?

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:57:06 +0000

My computing skills are pretty good. I found the installation and hosting as easy as pie. The database setup was a bit tricky having never touched them before but I had that solved in 5mins! I am currently using the Thematic framework (http://themeshaper.com/) as my starting point with the intention of styling the various elements through CSS. I’ve had a quick look through your code to find some of the plugins used. For me, it’s complicated to understand how to build templates for the pages, but perhaps you can cover that in a video?

By: iaan

iaan — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:46:42 +0000

Sounds like a good idea for a video or two. As a newcomer, how did you find the installation, hosting, database etc process?

Are you using a free theme for your WordPress site and where did you find it?