Design Shifts Website Re-launch

So I decided to give my design blog designshifts a makeover.  The original site design was simple and worked just fine, but there were things that I really wanted to try that I just couldn’t do with the site as it was. With the “new” design I wanted to fool around with a old meets new theme.  So I chose a great oldschool looking typewriter font called MyUnderwoodRegular and used the Font Squirrel @font-face kit to generate all the appropriate browser support for this font.   (Check out my brief article on @font-face)I think it will be fun to contrast the latest and greatest design and cutting edge development strategies with outdated typography and ancient computer and a printing imagery for the Public Domain.

For the back-end I used the WordPress Thematic Framework and created a child theme this time around.  Using a child theme gives you flexability and you don’t have to worry about losing all the files you changed when it comes time to upgrade your Core Theme.  (Of course you should be back-up your files anyways, right.)

I’m going with Meebo for my social sharing.  It’s just so convenient having the footer bar and makes it very easy for users to share images and content on the fly.  For my mobile version of designshifts I went with Mobify (Which is a great Canadian company).  I found it to be extremely easy to customize the way I wanted it.  As long as you understand and can manipulate your CSS and a bit of good old HTML your good to go!  There was plenty of documentation including these Webinars which are great (a little long winded but useful!)

If you happen to be viewing this site using IE6 you might be a bit confused with everything I just wrote.  I will not be developing any of my websites for deprecated browsers, so I have chosen to use the Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS brought to us by Stuff and Nonsense.

So now that the re-design is complete I can get back to filling the pages of designshifts with plenty of great content.  I hope you find something that you enjoy while you browse around the site and of course feel free to share designshifts with your friends!