Ok, down to business.  We got some interesting responses to the question, as you can see yourself below.

Results

It’s interesting to see that the minimalistic style, which is usually plain and straightforward, is very close to web 2.0, which is usually more cluttered and visually diverse.  Interpret that how you like, but all I know is that now I’m going to have to work hard to find out what exactly my clients will look for in my designs.

New Poll

Today I am releasing a new poll entitled “Do you use a WYSIWYG editor, or do you code in a simple text editor?” If you don’t know what a WYSIWYG editor is, never fear – Wikipedia always has an answer.

You can find the new poll in the sidebar – be sure to vote!

It just did.

Say hello to WordPress 2.8, or version “Baker” as they call it, named after noted trumpet player and vocalist Chet Baker.  Living up to WordPress standards, there are many new features in this version, as well as over 790 bug fixes from the previous version.

Inline Theme Installation

In WordPress 2.7, a great new feature was released called “One-Click Plugin Installation”.  Now this same idea has come to the themes section!  No more do you need to download a theme, unzip it, upload it to your site, and activate it.  Now you simply browse the theme gallery right from the dashboard, pick the theme you want, and press the “install” button.  Bam – it’s up and running on your server!  No hassle with zip files or uploading.

Syntax Highlighting

Editing template files (via the file editor in the dashboard) used to be dull black and white.  Now, with the new CodePress editor, it comes to life with colorful syntax highlighting.

Widgets Improvement

Previously, editing widgets was a pretty big hassle.  If you had multiple sidebars, there was no easy way to get one widget from one sidebar to the other, and if you deleted a widget, you’d love all of its settings.  If you wanted to use that same widget again, you’d have to reenter all of the settings that you had before.

WordPress 2.8 fixes both of these issues.  Now you can see all of your sidebars on the same page (no need to edit, save, switch sidebars, edit, save) and drag and drop widgets between them.  Also, if you set up a widget just the way you like it, and want to save it for later use, you can drag it to the “Inactive Widgets” area.  If you need it again in the future, just drag it out from that area and into one of your sidebars.

Screen Options

The great new interface that was added in WordPress 2.7 gave you the option to drag and drop sections in the dashboard to suit your needs.  Now, WordPress 2.8 gives you many more options for customization.  Here are a few of them:

• You can specify if you want 1, 2, 3, or 4 columns on the dashboard.
• In the Posts and Pages sections, you can specify what info you want to be displayed, such as Author, Categories, Tags, etc.
• Also in the Posts and Pages sections, you can specify how many items you want to display per page.

Speed Optimization

According to the WordPress.org blog, WordPress 2.8 is even faster than 2.7 due to optimized javascript and behind-the-scenes tweaks.  This means that the everyday actions such as approving comments, switching pages, and editing posts are even faster than before.

Conclusion

Taking into account the new features in WordPress 2.8 Baker, I would strongly encourage you to download it and give it a spin yourself.  If you already have 2.7, it’s as easy as pressing “Automatic Upgrade” in the admin.

As always, if you’re looking for information on the next version of WordPress (version 2.9), you can simply change the URL of the documentation from http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8 to http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.9.  There’s not much there yet, but there will be pretty soon!

And be good, find the best hosting for your needs. I love 1&1 but there’s something for everyone.

The Winner…

Congratulations to Mikah Sargent! Here is the winning comment:

Wow, I’ve seen Uprinting’s cards in “the wild” and they really do have fantastic quality. I’m trying to get my graphic design business off of the ground, and 500 cards would be a huge help. I’ve just recently designed a business card, and I was wondering who to go to for my print job. My goodness, five hundred cards isn’t cheap. I’d love to win.

I’ll be sending an email to him shortly with information about how he can claim his prize.

Thanks for everyone who participated in this giveaway! Make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed – I’m sure to be posting more giveaways as time goes on.

As web design has progressed and grown older, it has gone through many phases, and taken on many different styles.  Some of these are web 2.0, grunge, typographic, and “sketched” or hand drawn.  There is lots of diversity in what designers like and dislike, so I thought I’d ask you all what your opinion is.

Vote for your favorite style in the sidebar, and we’ll see what the most popular one is.

The Lonely Blog

There was once a lonely blog called TutorialWow that was in bad repair.  Its design was rusty, its code was out of shape, and its articles were getting old.  Every day, it got a sparse amount of pageviews, and even less visitors.  What it needed was something new and big to spruce it up, something clean and fresh that could give it that extra push into greatness.  It needed something like…like…

The Hero

…Ben Lind!  Sweeping out of the cyberskies, Ben rocketed down low over the blogosphere, looking for a lonely, distressed victim of the Evil Lord of Stagnantia to help out.  He came upon a blog so small that he could barely make it out next to the huge super-blog factories.  “Just the thing!”, he said to himself as he dove down to take a closer look.  He saw the rusty design, the out-of-shape code, and the old articles, and thought to himself, “This will be a perfect place for me to base my adventures from!  I think I’ll just take it over and give it a good cleanup.”  So he took over the blog (with the eager consent of the previous owner), polished up the design, and made some well-needed changes that had been overdue for a long time.

Lots of Change

Well, it obviously didn’t happen exactly that way, but that is pretty close to the right idea of what did happen to TutorialWow.  If you have been coming to the blog for a while, it probably hasn’t been the greatest experience.  The articles were good, but not really what you would call “high-quality”, and there wasn’t really that much new content.  I realized this, and decided to take action…

New Site Name

The first thing to be done to spice of the new blog was to change the name.  TutorialWow was a bit large and clunky to say and type, so I decided to change it to TutWow.  The word “Tut” has been going around a lot of sites recently – the TutsPlus sites, Web Design Tuts, and Fresh Tuts – so I thought I would join the group.

New Domain

Since I changed the name of the site from TutorialWow to TutWow, the logical thing to do next was to change the domain name also.  Surprisingly, tutwow.com was unregistered, so I grabbed it.  I used 1&1 hosting, as usual, and they did yet another great job at setting up my account.  WordPress installation was a breeze, as it always is, and I had a fully functional blog up and running in no time.  The only thing I needed now was a…

New Design

I had been working on a new design for TutorialWow a while ago, and had mostly converted it to WordPress (though there were a few kinks to iron out), but I never actually finalized it.  When I made the name change, I decided to finish the design, which went surprisingly faster than I thought, and put it up on the new site.

My Own Name Change

Many of you know me as Josh Drake – I’ve used that name for a long time now.  However, Josh Drake is only my alias – Ben Lind is my real name.  I’ve been using Josh Drake up til now just for privacy issues.  I’ve been using it for so long that I just never stopped even when there was no need for it.  So when I decided to make the changes to the site, I decided that it was a good time to “change my name” also.  It’s just so much easier to address myself by my real name than by any other.

So that’s what’s been happening around here recently.  I hope you like the new design (there’s a poll in the sidebar so that you can tell me what you think about it) and site name, because I worked a lot on them.  In the future, I plan on working even more on the blog to provide you all with a great resource to learn from.  Until then,

Design On!

Tutorial Wow has a lot planned for this year, and I thought I would let all you loyal readers know what to look out for in the new year.

1. Total Redesign

As you probably know, the current design on this site is actually just a free template created by Lorelei over at toptut.com.  Although it is a nice theme, it is a bit…well…old looking.  So, over the past few months, I have been working on coming up with a new design that will replace the current one.  So far, I have finished creating the design in Photoshop, and just need to convert it to xhtml and css before I can apply it.  That should be happening in the next few months or so.

2. More High-Quality Tutorials

Obviously I am hoping to write more high-quality tutorials for you readers in the next year.  What is the purpose of a tutorial blog otherwise?  If you have any suggestions, or you want to know how to do something in Photoshop, html, css, or pretty much any other computer-related subject, drop me a note and let me know about it over at the contact page.  I’ll try my best to answer your question, and if I think the subject would be good for other readers to know about, I will post an article about it on the main blog.

3. Wallpaper Tutorials

Everyone loves to have cool wallpapers that they found on the internet on their desktop for their friends to see and admire – it’s just a fact of humanity.  But how much cooler would it be to be able to say “oh yeah – I made this one in Photoshop myself”?  That’s why I’ve decided to start writing tutorials on how to recreate effects from some of the popular wallpapers out there so that you can make them yourself.  Then you can use what you’ve learned and create your own wallpapers to show off to your friends.

4. Interaction with My Readers

Though I have posted a lot of reply comments on my articles already, I haven’t really interacted with my readers much this year.  So in this new year, I hope to be able to help out my readers at a more personal level so that they can get their questions answered more easily.

5. More Twitter Posts

So far, I haven’t really been using Twitter that much for Tutorial Wow.  I have posted some, but it was only in a relatively small time frame, and I never really got into it.  In this year, I am going to install the Twitter app for my iPod Touch, and get a desktop client for my mac for it.  That way I can’t get away from being reminded about Twitter, and that should boost my posts quite a bit.  You guys can help me out with this by following me on Twitter – followers always boost morale.

6. Icon Tutorials

I’ve always loved slick software icons, and now that I have a mac, I have been seeing more and more of them.  I am going to start writing tutorials on how to recreate some of my favorite icons in Photoshop/Illustrator in the coming year.  It should be interesting – and fun!

Well, that’s basically what I’m aiming for in this new year.  If you want to see something more done on the site, drop me a note and I’ll consider adding it to the list.

As I said before, now I’ll say it again – Happy New Year!

My name is Josh Drake, and I live in the United States.  I started out what seems like ages ago with HTML and Notepad on a Windows system, and like all other web designers – great or small – began with the small, ugly, Times New Roman web page.  Of course, it looked horrible, but I thought it was the coolest thing ever.  I then scratched the surface of Javascript, but decided I didn’t like it so much, and left it behind.  I have regretted that decision ever since.

Now, roughly two years later, I am still learning some of the more advanced techniques of the web world, but have mastered HTML, CSS, and Photoshop.  Seriously, I could code HTML in my sleep I’ve used it so much.

About a year ago, I bought myself the Adobe CS3 Production Premium package.  Wow – did that open up a world of opportunities for me to create, learn, and grow my skills!  Now I could not only design basic websites, but I could spice them up with Flash, design logos with Illustrator, and create professional videos with After Effects and Premiere.  Obviously, that didn’t happen overnight, but with practice anything is possible, right?  Many people argue that freeware is the only way to get software, but I’ve gotta say that you can’t beat Adobe and their work flow.

This was all well and good, but I needed a way to let out my creativity on a good purpose.  I had come to the “getting tired of Hello World” stage.  That’s when I tried creating my own website.  The first result was…well…not something you would want to see, much less read.  But as I got better with using the programming languages and software, I slowly built up the site until I launched the blog that you are reading now.

Just in November, I got a Mac Mini as a gift, and entered into the Apple universe.  That was another major turning point in my design career.  Not only are Macs extremely user-friendly and sleek, but they have some great tools for us web designers.  Since my old PC was really slow, big, and clunky, I am still in awe at how fast the new mac is, and how smoothly Photoshop runs on it.  If you are wondering what type of computer to get, definitely go with a mac – it was one of the best decisions in my life.

And that brings us to the present day, with me creating websites for a few customers here and there, updating this blog once in a while, and trying to maintain a social life as well (welcome to the life of a web designer).  I really enjoy creating websites and illustrations, and I hope that I can continue to do it for the rest of my life.

If you ever have any questions about being a web designer, coding, or using the Adobe software, just drop me an email over at the contact form.  I’ll do my best to give you an accurate answer (or should I say educated guess) and help you out.

While we were all just getting used to 2.6 (and getting frustrated at some of its problems), the WordPress team was working hard at improving their product even more.  The result?  WordPress 2.7.  I have to admit that of all of their releases, the WordPress team has really outdone themselves with this one.  Not only do I love the new sleek interface, but the usability has been improved so much from the previous version that everything just seems to “work” how it should.

Below I have listed and described some of this great release’s best features, in the hopes that all of you WordPress users out there will see the light and upgrade their installations.

1. Sleek New Interface

As I said before, this version has a sleek new interface that makes it extremely easy to use for the average Joe.  Not only does it look really awesome, but it gives users the ability to customize almost all of its elements.  For example, on the new dashboard, if you don’t like having the “Recent Drafts” box on the top of the page, you can just click and drag it around to a different place.  Or, if you want to get rid of it completely, you can click on the “Screen Options” tab and unselect the “Recent Drafts” check box to delete it.

That’s just a small taste of the new interface, and there’s a host of other features that I haven’t talked about, but if you want to see them all then you’ll have to install it and check it out yourself.

2. One-click Plugin Installation

Before this version, whenever you wanted to install a new plugin on your blog, you would have to go to the WordPress plugin database, download the plugin, unzip it to your computer, upload it to the server, and finally activate it on your site’s admin.  Now that has all changed.  To install a new plugin in the new version, just go to the “Add Plugin” page in your WordPress admin, find the plugin that you want to install, and press the “Install” button.  That’s it!  No more hassle with downloading/unzipping/uploading to the server.

3. Quickpress

Quickpress makes it easy for you to write a basic post right from your dashboard.  You can still have all of the necessities in the post – title, text, tags, and media – but it’s a lost easier to post a short article in a few minutes instead of writing a full-fledged article with all of the other things on the “Add New Post” page to distract you.

4. Keyboard Shortcuts

Moderating comments has never been easier.  Now, on the new comments page, you can edit your blog’s comments with just the press of a key – literally!  Press J and K to select the next/previous comment, press A to approve, S to spam, and D to delete the selected comment, and finally press U to unapprove, Q to “Quick Edit” a comment, and R to reply to a comment all from the same page.  You can also bulk edit comments by using the checkboxes next to each of them and pressing Shift+A to approve, Shift+S to spam, Shift+D to delete, and Shift+U to unapprove the checked comments.

5. Comment Threading

Comment threading is a more advanced way of keeping track of replies to other comments.  For example, say you went to your website and saw that someone had posted a question at comment #7, and that there were 60 other comments after it.  If you wanted to answer the question in that comment, normally you would have to just post a new comment after all of those other comments, and hope that the person who wrote the question would sort through all of the comments and find your answer.  That’s a pain, isn’t it?  Enter comment threading.  Now, instead of having your comment come after all of those 60 other comments, you can simply press the “reply to this comment” button on comment #7, and type in your answer.  Your comment will be posted right after the question, and the asker can just find his own comment again and see the answer right after it.

6. Automatic Upgrader

Another big hassle with previous versions of WordPress was upgrading to a new release of the platform.  You would have to go to http://www.wordpress.org/download/, download the new release, unzip it, and then follow the instructions at the Upgrading WordPress.  If everything went right (which, often, it doesn’t), then you would have the new version installed on your site.  Again, that is a big hassle, and the WordPress team knows that.  So they decided to make everything easier for everyone, and add an “Automatic Upgrader” feature to version 2.7.  So now, when future releases come out, all you need to do is click the “stay updated” link at the bottom of your admin page, and WordPress will do all the dirty work of unzipping/uploading the new release for you.  Pretty nice!

7. Lots of more new and cool features…

Here are some of the smaller features that I didn’t get to mention in more detail above:

• Sticky Posts lets you make a post “stick” to the front page in front of all the other posts for a while (until you tell it to stop).
• Theme Update API tells you when there is a new version of one of your themes, just like the Plugin API does.
• Comment Paging so that you don’t have to have a super-long list of comments on a post.
• Batch and Inline Editing is a feature that got left out of the previous version, but got put into 2.7.  It lets you edit posts/pages right from the edit page, without having to actually enter the “edit page/post” page.
• Post Box Hiding for when you’re editing a post/page.

There are a few more features, but these are the best ones from my perspective.

I hope that after reading this article, you will strongly consider upgrading your WordPress installation to the new, sleek, cool, functional version 2.7.  And if you upgrade before January 4th of 2009, you will even have the option of getting in the Winter mood and having snow fall over all of your pages for a few weeks!  Now you have to upgrade.

That is the first time 1&1 has ever been down (as long as I have been with them), and other than that, they have a great web hosting service.  If you are looking for a host for your own website, then I would strongly suggest heading over to their website (1and1.com) and checking out their server specs.  I don’t want this to sound like a sales pitch, but I’ll just tell you from my experience that 1&1 is a great service and I would highly reccomend them.

As you can see, the site is back up and running fine, which is really great.  This should never happen again.

Header

First thing’s first – the header.  This is my favorite part of the template, and I think you’ll see why.  I used a glow technique to make the “globe” in the logo, and the same effect on the navigation link “Home”.  When the user hovers their mouse over one of the links in the navigation, the link will glow, and if they click on the link, it will stay glowing.  Take a look for yourself:

Sidebar

In the sidebar, I used the Arial font so that I could make the text dynamic once it was coded.  I used another glowing element in the RSS icon at the top of the sidebar, which ties in the glowing header.  Almost all of the elements in this design have some type of stripe pattern for their background, which gives it a much more high-tech feel than if they had been solid color.  Here is the sidebar:

Content Area

When designing the main content area of the layout, I didn’t want to have just a boring area of white, I wanted to make it more interesting.  So I decided to overlay a subtle wide-stripe pattern on it, along with drop and inner shadows to make it feel more three-dimensional.  I also made the horizontal rulers a blue color to tie in with the rest of the design.  This is the content area:

Footer

After reading some articles on good footer design in websites, one of which is at Smashing Magazine, I wanted to do something more in my footer than a bland “Copyright by TutorialWow.com”.  I thought that a good way to do this would be to place recent posts, recent comments, and About the Author sections into it, along with the copyright information.  I played around for a while with the glowing headers, and bullet points (which are using the same glow style as the header and RSS icon), and finally came up with this:

Final Theme

I have told you about each of the individual elements of the theme, and now I will reveal the whole thing.  As you can see, all of the elements tie in nicely with each other to create that cool glow effect that gives the theme its character.  Here it is (click on the image to see the whole thing):

Since I’ve been really busy lately, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any less busy in the near future, I probably won’t finish coding this theme for a while.  This is why I wanted to give you guys a sneak preview – so that you wouldn’t get too bored.

Until next time, happy designing!