simplicity is bliss

I love these bookcovers! A set of six that make up the Manchester Independent Economic Review – designed by Manchester-based design studio, Music.  (visit that link-very intriguing-but a dead end???) found these on creative review.

They are sucessful on so many levels- describes the title in a stark cut and dry image, image is large and engaging, colors stimulate the senses with their choice of sophisticated tertiary tones. I’d read it. Never thought I would say that about an economic review.

WordPress vs. Dreamweaver

Here’s some clarity for my fellow design classmates who are still debating how to go about making your portfolio site. I highy HIGHLY recommend hosting your own site through wordpress. If you (like me) have been pulling out your hair everytime you open up your dreamweaver file. If you have been plowing through tutorial after tutorial, blogs, and all the other information on the internet on how to make a website with no result other than utter confusion and hairloss…breath easy…wordpress is your friend.

I’m not saying to give up on Dreamweaver, but chances are, if your new to html and css you probably are not going to grasp how to hack through the code in less than a month. Hosting your own site through WordPress takes all the guess work out of how to make rollovers (they come stock in the themes, and can be modified if you wish) or how to de-bug your code so your site renders the same in Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera (wordpress will look the same on all browsers with no bugs to squash).

With a few simple & fast downloads, and your own domain; you can have your site up and running in less than an hour. really.

You’ve got your own domain, so what now?

log in to your domain and install wordpress, if your using hostmonster you will see the wordpress logo in the simplescripts (bottom of control panel) page. It will ask you what you want the site name to be, you probably only want to call it whatever your domain name is, if you add anything to this it will be a folder within your domain, meaning you will have to type in that extra line everytime you visit your site.

hostmonster will give you a username and password and link to get into your new blog-get in there and change the password right away, and anything else like bio if you want.

Download wordpress to your computer

open the file called: wp-config-sample.php in text edit or text wrangler (this is the best one, as it color codes the copy) DO NOT use word, it will add extra junk.

Add your domain user name where it says ‘USERNAME’:

/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘USERNAME’);

Now enter your password, where it say’s ‘PASSWORD’:

/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘PASSWORD’);

The line below that, looks like this:

/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

if your using godaddy you will need to enter your host name that godaddy generates for you where it says ‘localhost’

If your using hostmonster or another host site leave this line alone.

close it.

Download cyberduck or any other ftp driver you wish.

make a new bookmark in cyberduck for your site.

drag and drop all wordpress files into that bookmark.

Cyberduck is what communicates your computer files to your wordpress site. The wordpress files you just dropped in there is where you will be dropping in your jpegs for headers and downloaded themes, and anything else you want to put on your site. Think of this as your site files folder.

You will drag and drop downloaded themes into your themes folder (www / wp-content / themes) etc.

Now login to your wordpress blog and start makin’ changes!

for more in-depth instructions you can always get info directly from wordpress.org or lynda.com or even google, this should get you started though.

oh, and for millions of free editable themes go here

and your welcome.