Behind the Curtain

This site is now at its 4^th offi­cial ver­sion. It has evolved from being very cen­tered on Macromedia Fireworks (now Adobe Fireworks) to what I want it to be now which is, focused pri­mar­ily on WordPress as a plat­form to cre­ate all kinds of Web sites. I already tackle a broader range of top­ics than I used to and that range will get broader still… Damn the blog­ging gurus that advise to keep a blog sub­ject nar­row. That’s not me. I’d get bored in no time. WordPress itself is a broad sub­ject and is just a tool (even if the main one) in the toolset I use to serve my grow­ing list of awe­some clients. In short, I want the site to bet­ter reflect the “on build­ing pixel worlds” slo­gan in the logo. I still love Fireworks. It’s just far from all I want to talk about.

More per­sonal posts will prob­a­bly seep through as well. The site’s orig­i­nal intent was really to be a blog by the tra­di­tional def­i­n­i­tion of the term as a per­sonal Web log. That’s how it was at first although it was not run by a CMS or blog­ging soft­ware then. I’d like to get back to that in part. The photo gallery will be back as well as a port­fo­lio of my work. I’m real­iz­ing that my “per­sonal brand­ing” seems even stronger than my busi­ness’. I want to lever­age that as I grow that busi­ness to new heights… You see, like many oth­ers, build­ing Web sites is a pas­sion for me. So are help­ing clients with theirs as well as help­ing fel­low Web work­ers on their jour­ney. It may sounds cliché but this IS a never end­ing learn­ing process and the fun is in the journey…

On how pix​e​lyzed​.com was cre­ated and built

The site’s orig­i­nal design and graph­ics were cre­ated and are main­tained using Adobe Fireworks and the logo was designed in Illustrator. The design is NOT pro­vided by a pre designed WordPress theme. The visu­als were inte­grated into WordPress using the amaz­ing WooThemes Canvas Premium theme frame­work. Custom CSS and PHP cod­ing was done with Dreamweaver (yes, I still code with Dreamweaver, bite me! If I could, I’d still code in HomeSite!)

Regarding typog­ra­phy, the fonts used in the logo include NeoSans and Myriad Pro. Body copy (HTML text) was set using Droid Sans, my new fave body copy font on the Web. The color scheme was devel­oped with the help of the incred­i­ble desk­top ver­sion of Genopal Pro.

I took all the pic­tures that will appear in the soon to be revived gallery page using either my retired Canon S1IS cam­era or my iPhone 4S’ cam­era. Eventually, When I come around to recre­at­ing the gallery, I’ll add a lot of pho­tos from our 2010 trip to Las Vegas includ­ing our half day heli­copter trip to the Grand Canyon. I was lucky to take some pretty good shots there (lucky like, point the cam­era any­where, get a great shot

Any ques­tions you may have about this site, myself or my work, don’t hes­i­tate to ask. I am a free­lancer run­ning a grow­ing com­pany with many infor­mal part­ners that have com­ple­men­tary exper­tise to mine and are equally pas­sion­ate about their work. I’m not alone and we can prob­a­bly help you. Just con­tact me.

A lit­tle his­tory of pix​e​lyzed​.com

This site has gone through many trans­for­ma­tions since the orig­i­nal ver­sion went live in 2005. The orig­i­nal 1.0 ver­sion was up for a long time and many peo­ple com­pli­mented me on it. I look back at it rather fondly now but I decided to retire it when I con­verted the site to WordPress some­time in 2009. It was time to move on and I was sick of it at the time.

Version 2.0 (post WordPress) was tran­si­tional and there actu­ally were 4 dis­tinct ver­sions if I take into account the 2 free themes I used imme­di­ately after con­vert­ing the site to WordPress while I was learn­ing the ropes (these would be like 2.0 beta . The “real” 2.0 ver­sion was on the Thesis frame­work for a while then was con­verted to Headway with slight changes in the design. In any case, ver­sion 2.0 was up too long and I was never sat­is­fied with any of the iter­a­tions I’d designed myself to replace the orig­i­nal 1.0 design or the free themes… but client work took prece­dence and it stayed up. Until I put up ver­sion 3.0 in 2011.

I finally set­tled on a design I liked in June 2011 (and called it pix­e­lyzed 3.0). The ver­sion that was up the longest was built with the Headway theme frame­work after ver­sion 2.0b had been pow­ered by Thesis. I no longer use either frame­works for sev­eral rea­sons and now rely on either iThemes Builer or Woothemes Canvas. Version 3.0 was mostly an exer­cise in sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of the lay­out and design and the process con­tin­ues to ver­sion 4.0 which is quite sim­i­lar but bet­ter IMO…

The cur­rent ver­sion 4.0 of the site is pow­ered by Woothemes Canvas and I really think it’s the best ver­sion of this site yet! Like I said, it’s visu­ally quite sim­i­lar to 3.0 but the pol­ish of the base Canvas theme shows through. I also sim­pli­fied some things a lit­tle more. These are sub­tle changes but I really think they help. Under the hood and func­tion­ally, it’s a huge step for­ward from Headway 2.x. It’s a respon­sive theme with the kind of mod­ern fea­tures that will push me to post more and with a wider vari­ety of con­tent types.

So I hope you like pix­e­lyzed 4.0. Now that it’s done, I’ll con­cen­trate on cre­at­ing use­ful con­tent again and hope­fully post more often…