Took ya long enough!

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally got a new theme up on k.nu. The previous one was nice and all but I needed a change. I was waiting on inspiration, and oddly enough I got it from a damn game on my Tablet.  There’s a game called “Fashion Story” that I’m absolutely sick of playing but the color scheme for the game itself inspired me. When I showed it to Adam he said “OOH SUPER CUTE” and I told him to build something for me. He sent me a PSD with a base template, I added to it and went crazy with little tweaks and mods here and there and BOOM = New Template!

I mirrors templates that I’d done in the past. Everyone now, sticking with HTML5/CSS is going for the centered layouts with muted, but bold, colors. I wanted something completely different. There was a theme I created when I was on dork.com (over 10 years ago) that really reminded me of the theme that Adam started for me. Back then my coding skills were no where near what they are now, I think I tried to figure out what DIV tags were for that template because I’d previously used Tables and multiple frames to get everything to load. God, do you remember coding with FRAMES, that had to be the absolute WORST way to build a damn website – but no one knew any better, they just wanted to get as much information as possible onto a single page and that was the only way to do it.

I’m actually very happy that I was able to get this up and running. I know it’s not an extravagant WOW type of template, but I’m happy with it and that’s what matters.  I’ve been so busy working on numerous other things that having the downtime to get it done is really what mattered to me.  I started putzing around with it about a month ago, and was able to put the final touches on it for the last few days. I’d finished up a site that I was working on with Adam (for Kimberly J. Brown – remember her from Halloweentown?).  The site itself is ready to go in a Development folder we’re just waiting on the GreenLight to go live with it. It’s a fantastic change from the design she was previously using. It’s more hip, modern, and not located on blogger. This chick has been fully upgraded to WordPress and I’m hoping she’s super happy with the site.

My issue now is I’m at a ‘low point’ with work. So this means I’ll be working on random odd-and-end jobs to help Sean out, but I don’t have anything to personally handle on my own.  I know I’m helping him out with a site tomorrow, but then I’m jumping onto the total revamp of AGn Designs, it’s in desperate need of a facelift and I have quite a few sites to add to the portfolio.  It really sucks that I have so many NDA’s with clients, there were numerous sites that I’ve worked on that I’ve been so proud of but don’t have the ability to list them in my portfolio. One day I’ll get those kinds of sites for my own doing so I can joyfully display them, but for now I’ll just keep chugging away.

I do know that my usual boss has about 6 sites to send to me, but he’s been so damn busy with everything going on that they’re delayed at the moment.  I just hope that all of the sites he claims are coming to me aren’t going to show up mid-month in August. Our friend Colin is coming down to visit for 5 days and I really don’t want to be working the whole time he’s here. It wouldn’t be fair to him, and I already have a lot of stuff planned for us. Working would completely cut into that.

The upside to today, other than completing this, is I was able to get outside for a little while and do some much needed lawn maintenance. It’s been so long since I weed-wacked that I couldn’t even see where the bushes began and the grass ended. The grass grew straight up and over all of the trim/separators we have outside. I wacked that down straight to the dirt so I know I’ll have a few more weeks before I need to get out there again. Grass grows so damn quickly this time of year, I hate it. I wish I had a gravel yard … less maintenance.

The second upside – I found a site that makes all kinds of custom stuff for your business. It’s not vista-print – I effin’ hate them. It’s a newer site called BuildASign.com. I ordered a custom license plate, because Delaware is one of those states where you only need to have one plate on the car, so I’m utilizing the real estate that my car actually has (meaning lack of outside decoration) and I got myself a plate with AGn Designs logo printed on it. I did have to partially cancel my order with them because I chose the wrong size window decals – they were way too small for the amount of information that I actually put onto it. That was completely my fault, I know I was paying attention when I was setting everything up but I honestly didn’t even think about it being too small until my Mom had mentioned “Really, 3×5?”.  So now I’m working on getting everything larger so it’s easier to read.  The license plate should be here by the 15th. Hopefully today I’ll be ordering the larger sized decals and have them around the 15th/16th as well.

Anyone interested in a free AGn Designs window decal? I can offer free advertising to anyone interested in pasting it onto their car to aid me in a little free advertising as well.  Shoot me an email through the Contact page if you’re interested.

In any event, it’s knocking on 6am and I have an inbox to clear out so I can get some shut-eye.

3 Responses to “Took ya long enough!”

  1. Brandy says:

    This theme is awesome! Man, it’s been so long since I’ve designed a theme for my site.

    (I might have to ask what tweak you’ve used to display your Tweets and Instagram since mine broke causing me to have to deactivate the WordPress plugins and change my theme since it destroyed my layout… )

    • Krissy says:

      Thanks Hon! I desperately needed to do something, the previous one was really bugging me and it was just time for a complete change.

      The plugins are “Really Simple Twitter Feed Widget”, it does require the new API to setup, but that’s all done through your Twitter login and takes not even 3 seconds to do. The other is “Simply Instagram”, all you need to do is authorize via your Instagram account and then you’re good to go. Both widgets do require quite a bit of CSS fixing, but you can “Inspect Element” for the whole step of the way and generate everything with no problems.

      If you need any help, let me know. I can send you the base code for Twitter/Instagram that you can just customize for yourself.

  2. Brandy says:

    That would be fantastic. 🙂 Thank you!