About

I think the tagline pretty much says it all: “on build­ing pixel worlds…”

This blog is about every­thing related to build­ing Web sites and Web based user expe­ri­ences. But I come at it from the per­spec­tive of a lone free­lancer. When you are a one per­son shop, you have to opti­mize your work flow and become very effi­cient at every­thing you do. From archi­tec­ture, design and devel­op­ment to admin­is­tra­tive tasks, your tools and tech­niques need to help you stream­line your process so you can remain prof­itable. You also need to serve your clients with the same level of qual­ity as big­ger stu­dios or agen­cies. That’s what I aim to help my read­ers do with this site as I myself learn to improve…

This site is opin­ion­ated. I say what I think and don’t mince words. I also change my mind as I learn new things so don’t be sur­prised if I rec­om­mend a prod­uct and a few months later I change my mind. It can hap­pen to any­one as you learn your craft and your cri­te­ria for choos­ing a tool change as well.

WordPress

I’m a huge WordPress fan and afi­cionado and I’m falling deeper in love with the plat­form the more I use it. WordPress has become the cor­ner­stone of the cus­tom solu­tions I offer to my clients so it has become the main topic of inter­est on this site. That will not change in the fore­see­able future as choos­ing WordPress as my Web design and devel­op­ment plat­form is the best busi­ness deci­sion I ever made. I am more con­vinced of that now over 3 years down the line than I was when I made the move and I’ve been doing this for nearly 17 years now. So I’ll keep shar­ing my dis­cov­er­ies and the tech­niques I develop for build­ing com­plete Web sites based on WordPress.

Adobe Fireworks

Adobe Fireworks has long been the main tool in my cre­ative arse­nal and has been the pri­mary topic on this site for years. But the site’s focus has been grow­ing a lot wider and Fireworks is no longer my main topic of inter­est here. I’ll keep writ­ing about Fireworks from time to time and rec­om­mend it as much as I can but, for me, it has become just another tool amongst the many I use to do my job.

Why this Site?

Pixelyzed​.com was first cre­ated as a per­sonal exper­i­men­tal site. At the time, I only saw it as a place where I could exper­i­ment with design ideas and tech­niques and I didn’t expect many peo­ple to be inter­ested in it. But through the years it became a place for shar­ing ideas, tech­niques and use­ful tools related to my work through tuto­ri­als and arti­cles. I added a blog some­time in 2004 and that is when I started being known as an rabid Macromedia (Adobe) Fireworks advo­cate and evan­ge­list. The 2 most vis­ited pages on the site to this day are the tuto­r­ial and arti­cle I wrote about Fireworks which were both pub­lished on Macromedia’s (now Adobe’s) site. These are in addi­tion to numer­ous blog posts I’ve pub­lished about Fireworks.

I even­tu­ally removed the sta­tic home page and trans­formed the site into a full fledged blog then switched to WordPress in late 2009.

Trough the years, I also devel­oped a keen inter­est in what is now termed “User Experience Design” (or UX) and real­ized that it not only had always been part of what I do even though I didn’t have a name for it, but it’s always been my favorite part. I love to solve prob­lems and help my client solve theirs. In the last few years, I’ve worked at for­mal­iz­ing my knowl­edge of this field to inte­grate it into my process for every client project I work on.

Finally, this site not lim­ited to Web design, devel­op­ment or UX top­ics or to the Web itself. It’s about all I’m pas­sion­ate about which includes music (lis­ten­ing, play­ing, com­pos­ing and record­ing) as well as many other topics.

Please feel free to share your thoughts about any­thing here through com­ments or by send­ing me an email. I usu­ally reply in a timely man­ner unless I’m really buried in work. I can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.

Welcome and thank you very much for vis­it­ing and reading!