Then came all the articles on Wireframing and how it worked and the tools you could use. Wow!

Since I haven’t had a design project in a while (I’ve been mostly doing a lot of PSD to WP conversions lately), I haven’t had the chance to start a project with a Wireframe. My chance came a few days ago when a co-worker needed help re-designing one of his clients’ site. Yay! I was happy! Yesterday, I started wireframing with the good ‘ol pen & paper method. I got something down that I really like and last night I downloaded 960.gs templates and got started in Photoshop. It also gave me a chance to upload my first shot to dribbble! Woohoo!

I really liked the whole process of wireframing (from pen & paper to Photoshop). It clears my mind of everything related to colors and what to do design-wise and just concentrate on getting the elements of the page in the right place.

What about you? Have you been wireframing all this time? If so, what is it about wireframing that you like?

Yes, I was jumping in our living room when Alexandre Bilodeau won our very first Olympic Gold medal on Canadian soil a few nights ago in Moguls. I had the same reaction when Maëlle Ricker won last night in Snowboard Cross. I gave some “Woot” and major fists in the air when Mike Robertson, Jennifer Heil and Kristina Groves won their medals as well. I’m extremely happy for athletes who have improved in their performances even tho they couldn’t bring home a medal.

Our Women’s hockey team is kicking ass again. I can’t wait for the U.S.A. vs Canada match-up. As always, it should be a nail-biter.

Our Men’s hockey team finally started last night and had a great solid win over Norway. Again, can’t wait for Sunday’s game against the U.S.A. (and Russian hopefully down the line).

Unlike many people I’ve talked to, I quite liked the opening ceremonies. The effects on the floor were very cool. K.D. Lang’s rendition of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen gave me chills. Sarah McLachlan’s performance was great as well. I wasn’t overly impressed by Garou signing tho. I think Ginette Reno would have been a better signer for that one, it’s one of her big hits after all, by I guess Garou is more internationally-known than her and that’s why he was chosen. Whatever. The unexpected “Wow” for me was the “We are more!” poem by Shane Koyczan!

The major disappointment for me so far is the constant delays because of the weather. It’s fine that “some” of our athletes are used to it, especially our downhill skiers since most of them train in B.C. (tho even that didn’t help them!) but it must suck big time for those not used to the weird Vancouver weather.

Anyways…

Here’s to better weather for the skiers and great performances by our Canadians.

Making money off a forum is not easy of course so it shouldn’t be a motivational factor when starting one.

I’m writing this because I’ve been searching for a .NET problem and I’m pretty sure I found the solution but I can’t get to it because it’s a forum where you have to pay. How frustrating is that! I have to sign up for a Free 30-day Trial. Really? You know what’s going to happen right now? I’m closing that tab with the site I thought I had found my answer to and going to the next one in the Google results list.

And yes, I’ll remember that site so I won’t waste my time next time I’m looking for something.

Paid forums probably think that they get to ask for your money because they have the “best” people answering your questions. Again… really? I’ve been a member of many forums in my time (Sitepoint and TWS included) and, for free, most members will go to great lengths to help out. And in turn, when googling for something, I get my answer right away. Now, that’s a way to get people to come back and maybe even sign up next time!

Yep… I’m talking about my tutorial series I started at The Web Squeeze “From Photoshop To Wordpress” where the first one is about Design. Originally, I had planned to do all three (Design, Coding, WP) a month apart. That was the plan. But as I heard once before:  The Devil laughs when one plans ahead.

No kidding!

So why am I so late in releasing Part II – Coding? It’s the age-old excuse: lack of time.

Some of you may think it’s a poor one but that’s the only one I got. Unfortunately, I don’t have all day to write articles and tutorials. I actually have 9-5 job outside of my web design hobby and The Web Squeeze. I have a daughter that’s growing up too fast that I like to spend my time with when I get home from work ’til I put her to bed. I still play soccer and that’s something I doubt I’ll ever stop doing any time soon. And now summer is here and week-ends are spent as far away from the computer as I can.

On top of all that, I have clients that need stuff from me and new ones coming in now and then.

The good news is I’m learning. I’m learning to manage my time better and I’m learning that, like I said above, if you plan on releasing a Series of tutorials, do them all at once.

One more good news is that I’m 90% done with Part II.

I’ve known of the site from a while back but it didn’t make an impression with me at all back then. The design look quite outdated and I didn’t think it would take off. DesignFloat did the job for me; it looked good, alot of people on twitter used it and it supplied me with endless amounts of reading.

That’s until it started to crash… monthly, then weekly and then daily. That was getting annoying. People on twitter were getting annoyed and well… I just stopped going there and submit articles.

Then I noticed in my Flickr home page that Chris Spooner had this great looking logo up there and I couldn’t wait to see the rest. Finally, they launched the new design last week and I’m finding myself looking at it everyday.

Now let’s hope they have a good server (or a few) and keep the service up.

It’s very different from the minimalistic design that I’ve had up there for a year or two. I think this one matches more … me. The darker colors (even tho I’m wearing a light-blue sweater at the moment ) are more my colors. A few things changed in the process like the removing the “WHAT I DO” page and the latest entries from this blog in the footer.

Why did I remove the WHAT I DO page?

For lack of content I suppose. I’m looking to making it more a straight page portfolio. Show more of my work. What I do is simple and it’s pretty much the same as everyone else in this field: web design, WP theme’ing, etc…. so I thought it better to just put it up like that.

The footer

I decided to only show stuff from The Web Squeeze as that is my main project. My “full-time” project. We started getting quite a lot of hits this month which we are really happy about. A steady flow of advertisers on the magazine. We finally got BuySellAds on the forum now at last.

When’s the launch?

Hopefully soon … like by-the-end-of-this-week soon! I’ve only got the MY WORK page left to work out and I’m done. It’s been a long time coming and hopefully I can get this blog in a better shape after that.

Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.

It’s time to put a deadline on dropping IE6, and I say that time is now, and the deadline should be soon,  say like, March 2009. That’s roughly a little more than 6 months. Feel free to join me.

And don’t think for a second that this is the only “Give IE the axe” campaign … Oh no! There are quite a few out there already.  Elliot Jay Stocks says Death to IE as well.

As of now, I’m no longer including it in the standard project scope. If a client wants IE6 support, it’ll be an optional, charged-for extra.

While I agree that “fixing” (being nice here) a site to work in IE6 is a total pain the rear end (again… being nice here), according to TheCounter, IE6 is still used by 37% of internet users (for July). That’s still quite alot. So what do you do?

I think Elliots’ way of charging for IE6 support is the best way to handle this mess.

One comment that struck me on Elliot’s site is a great eye opener:

I bet you still put accessibility features into a site and I think the numbers of people who use those features are very much less than a third of the internet population.

How true it is. We slave away making sure out site is accessible to all but the number of users using Lynx or some other test browser is MUCH less than IE6 users. So why do we support them? Because they have NO CHOICE in the matter. And IE6 user CAN use another, better, browser. Not a person with certain disabilities. THAT is the difference!

I was always of the belief that you should support the latest two versions of IE. So for me, IE6 will be dropped when IE8 comes out.

So… what will you do? Will you totally drop support for IE6? Will you charge extra to support it?

There’s a few things I want to do with this blog and hopefully I will be able to keep it up. I want to start making backgrounds … don’t ask why but I’ve got just a bunch of different designs in my head right now that would be great for that.

Also, I know it’s a bit complicated because I always have 2 very distinct set of readers: the web design community and the jeepers, but there will be a new write-up coming soon on the install of my Xenon Flat Fender Flares. As soon as I can go through all the pics and my notes.

Which brings me to another thing. I know most people would separate both sections (Jeep VS Web Design). Have a different domain for each and it is something I have been contemplating lately. I love both! However, I feel like I don’t write enough about each subject to warrant 2 separate sites. Am I wrong? Time will tell I guess. And maybe if I get more time to go off-roading, I might have more to talk about? Hopefully that will come next year.

What else …. well… I think I want to get into WP designs. Putting out a few free templates and maybe some that could be good enough to warrant the Premium title that people would be whiling to buy. I’ve been doing A LOT of WP lately. This blog is/was my first WP site and I’ve learned a lot since then. We’ve converted The Web Squeeze to WP and we’re currently putting the finishing touches on the new design. And my latest is my husbands’ band site: Widow’s Walk.

The reason why I’m thinking of getting into WP themes/designs is, when I get into times like this – creative juices periods – I don’t want to loose those design ideas that I have stored in my head. I usually create what I call drafts and save them for a rainy day but this way, I could actually make a total site out of it and it wouldn’t get lost in the pipes like they usually do.

And going in to the same train of thought here, I will be making a series of tutorials on The Web Squeeze on (Part I) creating a site beautiful site in PSD, then (Part II) bringing that design in HTML/CSS and finally (Part III) setting it all up in WordPress. We’ve had quite a few requests for these tutorials so … I have my work cut out for me! That would be my first free WP theme available for download.

So in the coming weeks, be on the look out for desktop backgrounds and maybe a WP if I have time.

Oh and one more thing… don’t be shy! Leave a comment!

I’ve also been looking at Macs for quite some time. I’ve always wanted one. Yes… I know they are expensive but when you think of all the time you can spend “repairing” a PC with Windows on it, swearing at it, cursing it for the stupid OS that it is sometimes well… to me the price out-weight the troubles that PC sends my way. It’s an opinion and I do not want to get into a PC vs Mac debate.

So… we were on vacation the last 2 weeks and we stopped by Future Shop to have look at them. I really wanted to get one for my birthday. I think I was in there looking at them for 2 hours. Trying to decide if I wanted a MacBook Pro or an iMac. Then, once I decided on the iMac, do I want/need the 24inch screen?

Needless to say, I wasn’t leaving that store without a nice iMac box

After much debating, I finally went with the 20inch, 2.66Ghz Intel Core Duo 2 processor, 2GB of 800Mhz DDR2 SDRAM, 320GB Serial ATA hard drive.

It’s been 2 weeks now since I’ve plugged it in and started playing with it and all I can say is WOW! I love it!

So now we both have one. It’s an 8GB iPod Touch which is plenty for us.