Just finished up on the new design of Caterpillarmanuals.com. They offer the world’s largest selection of Caterpillar Manuals (Note: domain has changed as well as the logo and design).  They currently offer over 3,000 different Cat manuals to choose from.  They offer Caterpillar parts manuals, service manuals and operator manuals for both new and old Caterpillar tractors.  Along with the new site I designed the logo, box art for the manuals as well as the actual manual covers.  You can see some of them below.

Some new work I’m doing for Super Deluxe, a live music band based in Charleston, SC.  They’re one of the best Charleston wedding bands around.  But they do more than just weddings, they’re available for any live events and have played around the US and Mexico.  I’ve designed the logo and am currently working on their website.  Should be completed by the end of March.  If you’re in the Charleston SC area and looking for a band for your event give them a call.  Wilton Elder who is on the bottom right in the black sweater is the sax player and the person who initiated the project and I can personally say he’s a Super dude to work with.

Just launched the new design for EZnumbers.com. I was responsible for the logo design, software box art, software GUI and website redesign. I worked closely over the last few months with the owner Paul Hynek to launch his new and refreshing website. I’m very proud of this site and glad to finally see it go live.

Take a look and if you need to create a balance sheet, income statement or view your cash flow then give the software a try. Paul has put a lot of time into upgrading the software over the last year and it has been in development to some degree for the past decade. I don’t know how he pulled it off but he did. It’s pretty amazing software. If you want to start a business and need to see what your numbers look like then I’d definetely get a copy.

By the way, if you want to see what the original site looked like here’s a screenshot of it below. As you can see it was in desparate need of a redesign and some help with being SEO friendly.

DNSstuff.com looks so much better now that it has been redesigned. DNSstuff.com is a tool I use everyday to check whois info and to do DNS lookups. And it has looked the same for years. The new design is so refreshing. Here’s what the CEO of DNSstuff.com Rich Person had to say,

“This new look is just the first phase of a number of new additions to our site that will make it, by far, the world’s most reliable and comprehensive source for DNS information and problem solving in the DNS universe.”

Anyway, great job! Go visit the Best DNS tool around.

I can’t express how much I love iStockphoto. They have so many usefull graphics and videos for super cheap it’s ridiculous. You can find a ton of usefull photos, videos, illustrations, icons, etc there. If you’re a freelance web designer and don’t already use istockphoto then you’re missin out, period.

Downloads for one dollar,, are you kidding? Not with iStockphoto. You can find tons of great stuff on iStock.

There isn’t a yougraphic.com cause that would be pretty boring,, but there is a youtube. Have you figured out yet that video advertising is the wave of the future on the net? You can post any video for free to any free video hosting service like youtube, google video etc. You need footage though and maybe you’re not good with a video camera,, or maybe you don’t have one. Have you looked on iStockphoto yet? They have tons of video clips for $5 you can use to create your next video.

I’ve started experimenting with marketing via youtube and I am using video I got from iStockphoto. I’m not marketing anything really.. I’m just experimenting with how many views you can get from putting up video with certain keywords in the title. I am curious to see what gets the most hits. It’s for fun.

But seriously, Istock has a ton of great photos for your website or next brochure if you’re a graphic designer. You wouldn’t expect much for $1 but you can truly get great shots for that much if you’re looking to add nice images to your blog posts. I might consider doing that just to promote some artists on istock. There is some real talent on that site. Just search for anything under illustrations. You will see some great illustrators work.

iStockPhoto – Go have a look!

Examples of a birthday invitation website design I did for a friend. He wanted a website to send his friends to so they could rsvp.

View the live site at _______ – no longer online.

Want to clean up your CSS file and make it smaller in size? Check out this CSS tool that strips out whitespace, indents your css nicely etc. You can remove a lot of wasted space from your css from using it and I’ve already put it to use on one of my sites. Works great!

I found this cool site that allows you to turn your css design into a wordpress theme. It’s perfect for matching up the design for a newly installed wordpress blog on an existing site. It is really easy to use. You just create an account and get started. You need your stylesheet and the html to plug into a few forms. You do have to edit your html layout with some tokens so the content and sidebar of your new blog fall into the right places. The site is called themespress.com.

With ThemesPress, you can create your own WordPress theme in a four simple steps:

1. Upload the images your design uses
2. Copy the HTML and CSS of your design into ThemesPress [?]
3. Replace parts of your HTML with a few short tags
4. Set your presentation settings and preferences using our simple menus – and you are done.

Preview your design, edit it as much as you want, and if you like it, purchase it and download it.

Your new template costs a measley $10. After I created one for an existing site I just uploaded it and changed the permissions on the template files. I did this because I knew I needed to edit the style sheet afterwards because I generated the template fast for editing later. So, here is a theme I created using themespress for a photography site of mine. See how nice it matches the rest of the site. Anyway, if creating your own wordpress theme is something you’ve been wanting to do then now is your chance. Give it a try, I think you’ll like how quick and painless it is.

Update:::

If you do use themespress to create a wordpress theme then use Internet Explorer since Firefox has some problems when trying to preview the theme at the end. I created my first theme in firefox without any problem but the second gave me errors and then after viewing the theme in IE it showed up all weird. So just start in IE, even though you may hate it.

Also, make sure you have all your html just how you want it because you can’t edit it later, only the css. So if you do create your own theme and find out later some of layout is missaligned you can go in and still tweak your style sheet.

Looking for some color scheme ideas for your website or blog? I stumbled onto Daily Color Scheme which provides one new color scheme per day on their homepage. They also offer multiple formats to download the color scheme in including css, html, photoshop/illustrator file etc. I think this a nice idea as you can simply go through their color schemes and download whatever you want. I like the boldness of the sites design. The site is in it’s first beta which means it will probably last as long as the site owners have time to upload new color schemes every day and the popularity of it. Sometimes color schemes are hard to figure out if you don’t have something to go by. You can buy books on color schemes at your local bookstore like barns and noble or Borders. They are usually small are for quick reference. I know I’ve mentioned this before but Colorschemer.com offers an entire list of color schemes you can browse through and also some cool tools to get the perfect color scheme for your designs. There flagship software is called Color Schemer Studio and is a desktop application for creating color schemes. One cool feature is called PhotoSchemer. Use the PhotoSchemer tool to build unique color schemes based on any picture, image or photograph. Anyway go check it out if you’re in the mood for some color.

I stumbled upon this cool little flash photo gallery script that allows you to run a cool flash slideshow on your site. It is super easy to install and use. It’s basically a few files you have to upload and change the permissions to.

Then upload your images and it will create the thumbnails for you. You do need GD library installed on your server for the image resizing feature so make sure you have that installed first. I installed it on my Photos of Norway site in just a few minutes. There is also a cool flickr script which you can also use to create a cool flash gallery from your flickr photos.

The simpleviewer script is great for showing off your photos and is perfect if you are a photographer and need to easily display your photos on your website. Because it is flash though it’s not the best for search engine optimization purposes. I would suggest putting your photo gallery either in a subdirectory or if you do add it to your homepage that you do it in a way that leaves some space for static content.

I added a table to the top of my photos of norway site that includes static links to other sections of the site that the search engines can see and I could of added more text content to the lower section of the page if I wanted but left it out since I am not running an seo campaign for my photos of norway site. But if you are concerned with using flash for your photography site then there are ways to do it where you can still create an seo optimized page mixing flash with static content.

If you are looking for a more advanced flash photo gallery script be sure to check out my photo slideshow page where I display a very nice looking flash gallery that can be embedded into any site.

If you want more information or need help installing this or any script on your website please contact me. I’m a professional web designer that can help you with your business website.

If you’d like to take a look at a cool non flash website for your photography website then check out that link. You don’t need flash for a spiffy looking site.

If you need any help designing or optimizing your website please contact me.

Also, you might be interested in this super simple flash gallery that pulls images from your flickr account.  You can use it on your blog or normal html site.  It is also Free.

Some other posts about photography:

3 Ways Photographers Can Boost Business In A Bad Economy

WordPress Themes for Photographers

Embed Slideshow Pro in WordPress

Advanced Flash Slideshow – the best one on the market in my opinion.

Interested in creating more exciting slide shows of your photographs? Check out Animoto

Or check out this one of some of my design work:

Interested in creating flash slideshows or entire flash based websites with your photos? Check out Flashden