Pirate Cove

While designing your current project at some point you get to the point where you need to start doing browser testing. I recently wanted to find a way to get the various versions of Internet Explorer running on my new MacBook and decided to share with you the process I came up with for getting this all setup.
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I think everyone that does some design work and/or programming inevitably gets asked by their peers and other friends starting out, what kind of tools they use. After doing this for awhile there are a few things that you figure out, and mostly it is that your tools change as you change. But there are some staples in the list that I’m sure many of you will recognize. Let’s take a look at the applications I use on a daily basis.

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When you get to writing a website you inevitably get to the point of needing to include some libraries to help you out. Before now everyone had to go get these libraries in some form or another and include them in their code in their own way. Now with Google’s AJAX Library API you no longer need to host or even track these files down any longer.
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Tabbed navigation is something that many of us encounter on a daily basis to some extent while browsing the web. We will be talking about how to create this effect with jQuery and have each tab loaded dynamically. I will work through an example based on a project I am currently developing as well as review what jQuery is for those that are new to the technology.
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Welcome to the final chapter in this series. Today we are going to review the process for taking your newly created HTML/CSS files and turning them into a theme for your WordPress site. We will review what the theme system for WordPress consists of as well as some resources that are helpful in getting your project completed. By the end you should have a better understanding of how the WordPress theme system works and what it takes to get your custom layout functioning.
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Do you regularly backup your data off of your server? Many people setup database dumps and then leave them on their server. This doesn’t really help you in the case of the server dying on you. I’m going to share with you the script that I have that backs up all of the databases on this server as well as doing a full/incremental file backup as well. Wrapping it all up we will then FTP it off to a secondary location for storage.
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Welcome to Part II of the Sketch to WordPress series. In the last part we talked about design ideas as well as discussing ways to go about getting that design idea from paper to Photoshop. Here in this article we will be discussing how you take your final Photoshop Mockup and convert it to a basic HTML/CSS page. In the end you should be able to take your design to the HTML/CSS stage without too much hassle.
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Welcome to part one of our first series of tutorials here on the Cove. In this series I will be talking about taking a website design idea from those first sketches on some paper all the way up to a theme for WordPress. For this first part we will be covering some common design ideas and techniques, as well as some tools that I use to get the ball rolling on a project like this. I’ll be writing it from a ‘new to web design’ point of view, as that should work better for the few readers I have currently.
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