Firstly welcome to Digital Gangsta where we have decided to join the blogosphere of professional journo’s and wannabe web-superstars. While our focus is primarily web design we figured that in order to keep up with the online world we needed to become writers making our thoughts publicly available before concluding that sharing our knowledge might just make the web a slightly nicer, more attractive and easier place to surf. Not to mention the benefits of blogging; Search engines love it, we get to connect with our clients and other designers and hopefully we can prove that we know what we’re doing! – at least most of the time.
The blogging move was also inspired by the Pearce Twins, a power-family out to dominate their chosen industries who also saw the benefits of running a blog. Felicia Pearce is a fashion management and journalism student currently working for a major fashion forecaster who has built a popular blog about looking good after 40. www.ShesNoPlainJane.com is powered by Blogger and skinned with a customised theme. Digital Gangsta recently made some alterations to She’s No Plain Jane to include advertising space which Felicia is now selling to businesses and other bloggers.
Simon Pearce is a young freelance film director who’s debut ‘SHANK’ made a real impact on the low-budget world of cinema. Since the films success Simon has started a variety of other projects and uses his website as an online resume to promote previous work and his built in blog to keep fans bang up-to-date with the latest developments, productions and ideas. www.Simon-Pearce.co.uk is built into WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) so Simon can change the content of his website easily and add, edit or remove information and images as required. Word Press also acts as his blogging software and offers everything you’d expect in order to run a professional blog.
Lately we’ve been using Word Press more heavily in our projects because we can make it do almost anything we need it to. From a very small site with a couple of pages to something huge like Smashing Magazine with hundreds of posts the software scales perfectly to fit your needs. We’re really looking forward to the release of WordPress 3.0, which will bring us more features like Custom Content Types and Custom Menus, further increasing its flexibility as a great CMS.
Our aim is to use this blog as a place to write tutorials and give our readers an insight to what we do and how we do it. We use a variety of techniques to achieve the best results possible, using our expertise in Flash, JavaScript, CSS (and the very exciting CSS3) and, of course, standards compliant mark-up, so we’ll give our readers a few examples on where we’ve used each technique, how we did it, and why.
If you have any questions regarding any of the sites we’ve built – ask away and we may just reveal the secrets behind them.
Rock On.