About a two weeks ago I had the idea that it would be great to have a new site for the new year. So I started comping and settled on a design pretty quickly and jumped into coding. I knew I wanted to use Wordpress for CMS. I’ve done a couple projects with Wordpress in the past and had some experience with the template tags and liked the capabilities. Now that I’ve got the site using Wordpress, doing the redesign should be as easy as developing a new theme in the background and just flipping the switch.
There are a bunch of things on the site that are just temporary. The artwork section will be expanded. Currently I’m using phpflickr class to call the Flickr API and bringing back the thumbnails from my artwork set on flickr and using Lightbox JS 2.0 to build the slideshow. Eventually I’ll use more of the meta data from Flickr and display it along side each image.
The store page is temporary as well. I started working on the final version but didn’t finish it in time to launch. The links page is similar to the old site with the addition the tags for each of the links. I came across the tags in the feed so I wrote a little script to read the tags and build links back to the corresponding tags on del.icio.us. The comments on the single post page and the comment from need alot more work as well.
This design is a work in progress and I hope to make improvements throughout the year and, who knows, I might even do a major redesign in the middle of the year.
Happy New Year!
↓ Kevin Old @ January 1st, 2007 at 12:33 am
Rik, great looking site! Glad to see it’s live!
↓ Jacob S @ January 2nd, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Great re-design. I was a big fan of the old site as well. They both really compliment your work well. Good stuff.
↓ Paul @ January 3rd, 2007 at 12:02 am
It’s looking great! Did you D-I-Y the whole site?
↓ Luc Latulippe @ January 3rd, 2007 at 12:05 am
Yay! Commenting enabled! Great new look Rik, congrats.
↓ darkbop @ January 3rd, 2007 at 12:24 am
Wonderfull new look 4 u’re site Rik.!!!
↓ Rik Catlow @ January 3rd, 2007 at 9:01 am
Thanks everyone for being the first peeps to comment. Yes Paul everything was done by me, but Wordpress makes it a bit easier. The small custom things I used my newly acquire PHP skills.
↓ Gianni D'Alerta @ January 3rd, 2007 at 9:31 am
Kick ass… gonna miss the other site, but this one really nice as well.
↓ Hugh G. @ January 5th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Beautiful site, Rik! I especially love your header–very simple and unobtrusive.
↓ Kenny Saunders @ January 6th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
I like the redesign. The nav / color scheme is my favorite part. You should checkout Expression Engine, I think it’s a lot simpler, I just built out my first site with it.
↓ Victor @ January 7th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Just out of curiosity, what’s the font you’ve used in the header? :]
↓ Rik Catlow @ January 7th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Trade Gothic is used for the top logo and navigation.
↓ Brian Brooks @ January 7th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
high fives on the new site!
↓ Jeremiah Ketner @ January 7th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
wow! This site is amazing. Every artist should have one as cool as yours. I have a wordpress site, but stopped working on it due to lack of skills. I am really inspired by how functional and practical this site is. Great work!
↓ Geoff Wright @ January 8th, 2007 at 5:29 am
I love your website - its very nice a simple…
Well done sir!
↓ Rik Catlow @ January 8th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Thanks Jeremiah & Geoff.
↓ robotJAM @ January 9th, 2007 at 4:38 am
Great new site rik, lovely clean design.
↓ Pete Capp @ January 9th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Love the new design! What font did you use for the painting and T-shirt banners on the home page?
↓ Rik Catlow @ January 9th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
It’s Trade Gothic, same as the logo and navigation. Just not all caps.
↓ Michael Doig @ January 10th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Rik I really like your site, great looking comments as well.
↓ Patrick @ January 11th, 2007 at 2:01 am
Amazing site. Amazing. I found the place on CSS-Drive.com. I checked it out, was amazed, left, and then came back to bookmark it ten minutes later as an model site for me to aspire to. You know it’s good when you come back for seconds, eh? Nice, nice work mate. Excellent job. Highly impressive.
↓ Stergios @ January 11th, 2007 at 3:38 am
Good-looking site Rick. Gongratulations for this great work. Stergios from Athens, Greece.
↓ Brandon @ July 31st, 2007 at 4:56 am
Rik - where did you pick up your PHP skills? I am looking to hone my PHP skills even more, since they are pretty basic.
BTW - I have almost read all the same HTML and CSS books, going to check out Dan’s books and the HTML Dog website and book.
Just wondering where you picked up the PHP skills? Another book and trial/error?