Jake is getting back into Freelancing business to (hopefully soon) do that full time. We upgraded all his services… And when he said that Prepressology needed a new look… I jumped into it! I fired up MAMP and started working locally.
The first thing I did when approaching this project was to see his (and his business needs), bringing the blog up to the new social media standards. Working together was key. I wanted to give it a prepress look, and took the idea from the menu bar on the color blocks. Here was my first suggestion for one of the accent dividers in between posts:
After I showed that to Jake on the preview for the site, he suggested I do it on CMYK order:
Looked better, but still something was off. We decided to use the color registration marks with 80%-100%-20% opacity for each color, and we got our winning combination! Looks so much smoother and well thought of.
After that, we wanted to make a custom Gravatar for those who don’t have one set up for themselves. We’re both fans an app called PressCheck, and they have some out of registration marks on the splash screen. We were inspired about that and put together the avatar for the site.
My next step was to download the Database locally so I could check up all the posts, links and content on the new template. It was crazy I tell you. Jake has been blogging since August 2005, and there was something funky with the DB. It was 86.0 MB- just the wp_coments was up to 64MB. I seeked out help from the wiseman (a.k.a Nico Pin from Snowy Day Design) and he suggested export and download everything on the data base but the comments and then a second round with just the comments. Finally it worked that way and I got to test it locally.
Then time of truth: Jake still was using WP2.1. With Jake, we decided to uninstall everything and start from scratch. I imported the clean and fresh DB (the problem was on how spam was handled), installed WP, Plugins and the theme. Then… The final result:
Home
Blog Post
I added the RT button, Facebook likes for each post, as well as links to his Twitter, Facebook and Flickr Pages. We still need to fix some little things here and there, but overall the look for the site is pretty much it. Over the next few weeks, we’ll add a portfolio section to the site to showcase all his work.
I hope you like Prepressology‘s new look, I had a blast working on the site!
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