Sebastien Page » Design

New Blog Design

Sebastien — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:30:34 +0000

Every 6 months or so, I like to get a new blog theme for my blogs. I was way overdue with this one as I hadn’t updated it since May 2008. As usual when looking for an original WordPress theme, I went directly to Smashing Magazine as they always have the best looking designs for whatever you might be looking for. After digging around the website, I finally found what I was looking for: the ColorPaper theme designed by FTL.

Setting up the theme was not as easy as I thought. At first glance, everything was looking great but then I realized that there was a conflict with my All In One SEO plugin: all pages were showing the same meta title: Sebastien Page, which is the blog name. Other meta information (keywords and description) were working fine though. I looked around on the web for hours in search of a possible solution to my problem without finding anything.

So in order to keep my blog as SEO optimized as possible, I had to tweak the tags in the header.php file. My meta title nows looks like this:

<php if(is_home()): ?>Sebastien Page<php endif; ?> <php if ( is_single() ); ?><php trim(wp_title(“”)); ?>

This function basically tells the browser to use “Sebastien Page” as meta title if it is the home page, or else, it will use the post title, tag, category, or archive as the meta title.

I emailed the folks over at FTL to see if they know what my problem with All In One SEO may be and I hope they will get back to me, although I doubt it.

I also had issues with the javascript tags in the sidebar and I had to disable them.

I have to admit that ColorPaper is a great theme but the documentation that came with it was inexistent.

Leave a comment to tell me what you think of this new theme :)

Twitter Background Image

Sebastien — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:30:24 +0000

The other day I was looking for a new background image for my Twitter page so I did what any normal person would do, I googled it… I thought I was going to be overwhelmed by the amount of websites offering such a service; I mean, how many of these are there to pimp your myspace page? But I was wrong, there is no good site out there that offers good and original Twitter wallpapers.

That’s why I decided to post about this so if like me, you’re looking for a theme for your Twitter page, you may want to check out some of the following sites.

UPDATE: I recently created a website called TwitBackgroundImages.com where I will try to upload Twitter backgrounds as often as I can. So hop over there, and check them out!

Web Distortion

This is my personal favorite. Paul Anthony offers us what he calls “26 awesome backgrounds for twitter fanboys (and girls)”. I really like this site because it gives original templates with the matching color codes so you can also customize your designs colors.

BoinBlog

French entrepreneur Fabrice Epelboin says that like me, he was looking to personalize his profile page on Twitter but he couldn’t find a good website. Unlike me though, he has design skills so he was able to make his own. He has 2 PSD files to download. They are really worth the look.

Twitter Backs

This website offers 5 PSD files of Twitter backgrounds that you can download and tweak to make your own using an image editor. I’m no designer so I couldn’t use this but you might be able to do something out of it. If you’re a designer, you can also submit your Twitter designs to the site.

The Closet Entrepreneur

This blog post tells you how to create an original Twitter background template using PowerPoint. From the author: “Who would’ve thought that the presentation app used to lull audiences to sleep could also be used to create an appealing Twitter background? The process is fairly simple and only limited by your imagination and Twitter’s 800Kb upload limit.”

Capitalist Cookbook

A few PSD files to download and tweak. Not really interesting.

Twitter Treats

This designer actually offers her free services to design Twitter background images for you. She also have a few original wallpapers to download. Definitely worth a look.

HongKiat

Three Twitter wallpapers with the Twitter bird on them to download.

If you’re a designer you may want to visit CronCast to get the Twitter background guidelines. From file dimensions to color palettes, he tells you eveything you have to know on the specifics of creating your own Twitter wallpaper image.

Any other sources that you know? Please share them in the comments. Oh by the way, follow me on Twitter ;-)

Cool Twitter Graphics

Sebastien — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:55:45 +0000

A few months ago, I was searching cool Twitter badges on the Interweb and came across this website. Randa Clay has some very nice Twitter graphics over there. I downloaded all of those that have a transparent background and added them to my Twitter set on Flickr. If you’re looking for some original Twitter badges, that’s the place to go.

You can see one of Randa’s Twitter graphics in the sidebar of this blog.

4 original USB sticks

Sebastien — Thu, 29 May 2008 04:38:10 +0000

The Sushi USB Stick

The Barbie USB Stick

The USB Shrimp Stick

The USB Thumb

42 Original Business Cards Designs

Sebastien — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:47:27 +0000

Reenconded lists 42 awesome business cards designs. They are the most original biz cards I’ve ever seen.

Here are just a few samples. Go to Reencoded to see all of them.

New blog design: tell me what you think

Sebastien — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:52:15 +0000

I spent a few hours last night tweaking codes to come up with this new design. It all started with Angie (my co-worker) telling me she didn’t like the old theme. That was just what I needed to get on it and make it look better (or so I think…).

There are still a few things that I can’t figure out such as the image border. All images have a grey border and I like this. The problem is I don’t want this border for the sidebar and the footer images. I know I have to create a new attribute in the CSS file but I can’t figure out how to do this. Can any of you help?