Baby, its cold outside

It’s Sunday, the snow has come and its cold outside. The time has come to crank up the old boiler and get cosy indoors. So far we have been lucky this winter as this is our first snow fall and so far its not too heavy and the forecast is that the temperature will stay hovering around freezing for the next few days. Could be worse like in Europe with temperatures falling to -35 some nights. Brrrrrrrrrr!

Essex UK

In this corner of Essex where I live, often referred to as the Tendring peninsula, we so often escape the bad weather that is in the rest of the UK and the peninsula appears to have a micro-climate all of its own. We seems to be much drier here in this corner with the lowest rainfall in the UK, which is certainly a draw back for the struggling farmers who constantly have to irrigate their crops in the summer months. This corner of Essex also has a nickname, the ‘Essex Sunshine Coast’ with around 40miles of sunshine coastline dotted with seaside towns like Clacton and Frinton and a large ferry port at Harwich, the gateway to Europe.

This past weekends seminar was invaluable. Those who attended have been working on the XOrc 2012, testing and familiarising themselves with the various features that the new version of the XO has to offer. It’s always exciting keeping pace with all the new developments and additional feature a script has introduced. The XO2012 is no exception. Why do I work with the WP based Semiomantics XO themes? after much testing over the years I have found that not only is Semiomantics is the best performing script its also the most versatile. As Yorgo says, there are 10o1 ways the layout can be manipulated to create a new theme.

Mobile ready

Technology is going mobile, therefore the focus for a web designer  means making sure that the designs implemented are lightweight and fast loading and clearly seen and navigated on any mobile device. What looks good on your desktop pc may not necessarily impress a visitor on a mobile.  So, a theme must be flexible and responsive, across browsers and cross-platform compatible. What you see in the IE browser is not always what you see in Firefox! How a site looks on a smartphone is not the same as on an iPad.

Semiomantics XO2012

I am still working and experimenting with the new Semiomantics features and exploring the possibilities. As the theme is tuned to CSS3 and HTML5 cutom design can make the theme more visually stimulation for a visitor. Included here is a first draft of a demo site undergoing some customisation.

Updated my Flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zonicholas/6802062847/
hope you like it!

New Semiomantics XO Theme for WordPress

The above Screenshots represent just some of the pages, features and looks the 2012 Edition of the high performance XO Theme for WordPress has up its sleeves. The above site is the fruit of the 2 Days Ycademy Online Seminar for Semiomantics Developers and designers.

The 2012 Edition of XO is focused on even more flexibility in as much as editing, cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility are concerned.

The Site displays perfectly on Mobile devices, showing responsiveness also of the plugged in scripts chosen of which some have been adapted to satisfy the high standards of Semiomantics Publishing Scripts for Excellence.

The site elaborated at the Ycademy Online Seminar this past week-end features some smashing features, such as:

• Background Slideshow, customizable for each page, post or archive
• Built in Directory
• Media Library for YouTube and Vimeo
• Pro-sliders which can be deployed anywhere on the site
• In addition to the responsive design, a separate light Mobile Version is available
• Bold and Efficient Navigation
• Built in Custom Fonts
• Social Network connectivity and publishing
• and much more.

The XO script is well commented and offers designers a clean and straight forward environment for custom developments. XO uses best practices for WordPress development and makes the best use of the possibilities offered by the WP back-bone, assuring smooth integration and optimized conflict handling.

XO is a great playground for designers. The DIY version allows anyone to adapt layout and colors to taste right from the back-office; there is no need to have any knowledge about coding or designing. The theme behaves like a Chameleon and adapts to specific needs with just a few clicks of the mouse: pre-configured layout elements transform your XO quickly into a Magazine, Newspaper, personal Author Blog, a Media Hub, a Shop, a Marketing Machine, a Social Media Publisher, a Product Promoter or a Fan Site or most anything your imagination dictates.

For the professional designer, XO offers a well commented environment. Custom code can be added right from the dashboard or, as I prefer using a child theme. XO is tuned for HTML5 and CSS3 use, making it a modern and inspiring framework for exceptional design effects.

Out of the box, the XO Theme for WordPress provides a stable and reliable, robust and optimized solution for common use. It provides built in features such a slider with multiple transitions and a one click selector for easy use.

Layouts can be easily adapted to needs and purpose of the site. In fact, most custom designers rely on the theme engine to format efficiently layouts.

The site featured in the above gallery uses a few pro plug-ins to add functionality in function of customer requirements. The integration of such add on scripts is a relatively simple process for designers and developers.

XO has been developed for high performance, productivity, excellence in publishing and flexibility. For the professional users, the XO Theme constitues a solid base with a huge potential for customization and creative artistic expression.

The release of XO Version 3.3.x is planned for the first week of February. The present Release Candidate has been thoroughly tested. A few minor issues will be taken care off before XO will be available to the public.

If your site is running on Semiomantics XO suing basic customization, the theme can just be overwritten. (Save your custom CSS beforehand.)

If you are using a custom version with custom developments or a child theme, some of your customization will need to be adapted to the enhancements of XO 2012. This concerns namely custom headers and footers as well as custom functions.

Support for developers and designers is available as usual at our Ycademy Online Calls and Seminars or through Semiomantics Pro Support.

Related posts:

1. Semiomantics Thesis Interpretation
2. WordPress Shop Version 3 by Semiomantics
3. Semiomantics XO Blog
4. Semiomantics XO 2010 Edition
5. Ycademy Online Seminar January 2012

Saturday was a busy first day at the Ycademy seminar on ‘Semiomantics XO with CSS3 and HTML5′. The new Semimantics XO2012 is a sound base for further developments on  an already top performing script. Using both CSS3 and HTML5 it is  now possible to add elements such as video and audio straight into the code without the use of external plugins which often slow the  opening process or create conflicts. The focus today is on speed, and this is greatly enhanced with the use of HTML5 especially for mobile applications.

With CCS3 its also possible to add new elements to create more visually stimulating  web designs.

CSS3 & HTML5

Sunday will be another stimulating day packed full of information and workshops on creating content and design with CSS3 and HTML5. This is just the begining of an exciting year ahead at Ycademy, and more exciting, stimulating and cleaner designs for our customers. More coming soon.

Responsive Themes for WordPress

Responsive Websites become a must in 2012. This tutorial demonstrates how to make your WordPress Theme Responsive.

In very simple terms: Responsive Web Design aims to display content adapted to the visitors screen size. This means namely that the layout width must be fluid, i.e. expressed as a percentage of the width of the screen, typefaces expressed in em and images must be scalable.

Responsive WordPress Theme XO by Semiomantics

Practically speaking: a responsive designs can be viewed on a smart-phone or on a large PC screen, the display will always be the same and adapted to the size of the screen or browser window. n stead of using multiple style-sheets for different screen sizes, designers use Media Queries which allow to create multiple layouts using the same content. To achieve scalability, CSS media queries, such as min-width or orientation are used.

A quick and easy way consists in creating a child theme; this allows you to upgrade your theme as the case may be without altering your customizations.

1. Create a new folder in your wp-content/themes folder and name it anything you like; for the purpose of this exercise I call it “responsive”

2. Create a style sheet in your new Child Theme folder (call it styles.css).

3. Suppose your main theme is called “wptheme”; paste the following into style.css

 /*
 Theme Name: wptheme Child
 Theme URI: http://www.yourdomain.com/
 Description: Child theme for wptheme
 Author: Your Name
 Author URI: http://www.yourdomain.com
 Template: wptheme
 Version:1.0
 */

The only line you really need to respect is Template:wptheme; this line refers to the parent theme folder.

4. Import the parent themes style-sheet by adding now the following line to your new style.css:

@import url(“../wptheme/style.css”);

5. Define the screen sizes you design for. (Smart-phones, tablets, PC) To test the result we just create different h1 color values for the different screen sizes:

@media screen and (max-width:320px)
{
h1 {
color: #ff0000;
}
}
@media screen and (min-width:321px) and (max-width:768px)
{
h1 {
color:#00FF00;
}
}
@media screen and (min-width:769px)
{
h1 {
color: #0000FF;
}
}

Having set these basic parameters, you can now apply styles and layout values to taste, such as vertical navigation display on small screens.

To make images responsive we will need to take some WordPress specifics into account and there fore we will intervene with CSS3 and Media Queries and modify styles.css and functions.php of our theme.

Add the following to your style-sheet to make images scalable:

img{max-width: 100%;}
img{ -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; }

Now the images will be re-sized to fit horizontally, while the vertical scaling is still defined by WordPress. We need to remove WordPress image height and width values to scale our images proportionally.

In WP, image classes come with a with and height properties; we delete these properties like so:

change in your WP editor:

<img class=”imgclass” src=”../images/imagethumb.jpg” alt=”” width=”100″ height=”100″ />

to this:

< img class=”imgclass” src=”../images/imagethumb.jpg” alt=”” />

This will work for your post and page images, however not for the images created by WP dynamically, such as post thumbnails. We need to delete with and height properties dynamically with a function.

Add to functions.php:

function remove_wp_width_height($string){
return preg_replace(‘/\/i’, ”,$string);
}

Now you need to make a final modification in your template and replace:

the_post_thumbnail();

with the following:

echo remove_wp_width_height(get_the_post_thumbnail(get_the_ID(),’large’));

That’s all!

Hopefully the above will help you to do additional customization wok and as the case may be, to adapt your great themes to the requirements of 2012 Web Design.

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Related posts:

1. WordPress Christmas Themes
2. WordPress Themes and Development
3. Best WordPress Business Themes
4. How to Style the WordPress Menu
5. New XO53 Theme for WordPress

Entertaining a young child on a wet Saturday afternoon resulted in a sticky face and hands, a big happy grin and a tray of gingerbread men, and of course they needed decoration after being baked.

It’s never easy finding things for children that they want to do when it’s cold and wet outside, but cooking seems to go down well with our young grandson. It certainly is a fun way to spend a few hours  together and they learn so much without realising it. The only draw back is the cleaning up afterwards.

Gingerbread men

Gingerbread man

It’s funny how this tradition of baking a gingerbread man has caught on and stayed with us even in the 21st century. Wikipedia states ‘…Gingerbread dates back to the 15th century, and figural biscuit-making was practiced in the 16th century. The first documented instance of figure-shaped gingerbread biscuits appearing was in the court of Elizabeth I of England. She had the gingerbread figures made and presented in the likeness of some of her important guests…’

There are many versions of the Gingerbread Man story and probably as many versions of the gingerbread man recipe which is basically like a biscuit recipe with ginger, syrup and spices added and then cut out into the shape of a gingerbread man. A short bake in the oven and we have something  tasty to eat too. How you decorate your men is entirely up to you or the children who made them.

Attending this weekend 28/29 January 2 day seminar “Semiomantics XO with CSS3 and HTML5″ Click here to check out the details.

Semiomantics XO with CSS3 and HTML5

Time has come to learn about new technologies available for web designers and developers. All common browsers are increasingly able to read and interpret CSS 3 and HTML5 and about all computers are equipped to read java and jQuery. Therefore new possibilities become available to XO developers which we will focus on during the January Seminar.

XO has evolved over the past 4 years along with WordPress Developments. The theme has become responsive and shows perfectly on smart phones and tablets.

Subsequent to the release of WordPress 3.3.x XO needed some adjustments and updates which we have implemented and tested. New design functions become available for advanced customization. XO remains the most flexible theme for custom development, accessible to most anyone.

The goal of the seminar is to become familiar with XO and it’s new features as well as to learn how CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery allow to adapt XO to most any customer’s needs.

Some of the technical issues we will have a detailed look at are:

• Transparencies with CSS3
• Background Sliders
• Mobile Verions using WPTouch Pro
• Content and Frame sliders with Pro Slider and SlideDeck Pro
• Social Network connectivity with FacePages
• How to make a WP theme responsive (adapting to different screen sizes such as Smart Phones Tablets and bigger)

The most obvious expansions are via plug-ins. We will show how to make the best use of plug-ins for the Mobile Web, Social Networking, Social Media Publishing, Social Network Marketing as well as for more attractive display. Time permitting we will look into additional functions, such as shopping cart or marketing specific scripts.

We also will start looking into another important chapter:

How to convert your XO sites into a Mobile App!

In order to make the understanding easier, we will build a new site during the 2 days event. Please join our pre-seminar call on Thursday to prepare the event by setting up a new XO powered site.

All materials will be provided. You will just need some images/photos, videos and other content you may want to use to populate the XO site.

Saturday and Sunday, 28/29 January, 2012 from 1 pm London time till 9 pm London time.

Tickets are available on our new shop at HIOD.com. Please click on the below image to order.

Discounts as usual for Ycademy Pros: Please mail Bianca at bianca(at)ycademy.com for the coupon code.

Related posts:

1. Ycademy Online Seminar January 2010
2. Ycademy Online Seminar May 2011
3. Ycademy Online Seminar
4. Ycademy Online Seminar April 2011
5. Ycademy Online Publishing Seminar

Oh dear, another trend and dilemma!

This Social Media puts me in a spin!
Do I Digg or do I Flickr?
Do I Mash or do I Twitter?
Circle here, Foursquare there,
Where should I really dare.

First it was the SEO,
Now its Linkedin, have a go!
Build the traffic, cause a jam,
Hostings going crazy with too much spam.

Do I tick or send a click?
Will what I do really stick?
For every action will there be some satisfaction?
Connecting, rejecting who or what
Communicating on YOUtube, Who cares a squat!

Do I Google or skip over and test out Noodle,
Make some pages? or Meetup with friends I’d not seen for ages.
Facebook, Empire, Tumble or Stumble
Or better still do I just fumble.

Fingers crossed it does the trick!

Reading, believing, staying in touch,
Tips and tricks and all that stuff.
When will it end this media run
It’s getting boring and now no FUN!

Social Media Marketing

Putting some fun back into social media marketing. Just enjoy!