Kristin Currier

Just finished Flash CS5 Essentials. I already know older versions of Flash, as well as most Adobe and Macromedia software, but it’s always good to stay up to date, especially since I have Creative Suite. I’ve already plowed through most CS5 Essentials courses. I’ve diverted my attentions from learning WordPress development because I think it’s more important to be current on the latest software, and also my job will be calling for certain skills I need to be versed in. We’re re-doing much of our site so I will be brushing up on advanced HMTL/CSS again very soon.

Wanna see my current Lynda.com certifications? I’ve been getting lots of them, particularly Adobe Creative Suite CS5 and some Social Media Marketing. Go here!

Digging into WordPress by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr

So yeah, I won this book. I am stoked. I’ve been wanting to redesign this old site of mine for some time now as my skill set has definitely expanded since I first put it up. And I’ve been wanting to do it entirely in WordPress, since I already have it installed onto my existing static site in the form of this here blog.

But time is a fleeting thing….I don’t know how folks do it when they hold down a full-time job like mine. I realize some have time while at work to work on their own stuff (because I know who they are), but I do not. My job is nuts. eCommerce is not for the faint-hearted or lazy. My department consists of exactly 2 designers and we do the work of 20. Even if I didn’t have this obsessive-compulsive New England Puritan work ethic and felt it was OK to work on my own stuff all day, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do so. I don’t even have time to maintain a proper blog.

What about the rest of the day? Well, I’m up at 4 or 5 am drinking coffee and watching Lynda.com videos, learning about my new CS5 and web technology. Then I work out. Then I go to my crazy job (which I love in many ways) and pump out graphics for a site designed back in 1996. So all the new stuff I know? Unless it’s Photoshop, it’s not doing anyone any good. All our software is old, and we’re running on HTML 4.0 Transitional and suffering from a bad case of tables and divitis. And it’s not like our IT department wants me to be experimenting with Javascript or anything dynamic anyway. So it’s Photoshop, Photoshop, Photoshop, and some Dreamweaver, all day (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). Then I come home at 7, eat, watch Jeopardy, and go to bed at 9.

Fascinating.

So progress must be had! Lynda is going to take a back seat while I get pumped on WordPress with the help of this book and the kindness of Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. I can’t believe I actually won this book by telling them I haven’t done a 1 damned interesting thing with WordPress. Many thanks to Chris and his excellent site CSS-Tricks, where I have have spent many hours learning vast quantities of stuff I hope to actually use someday.

…as soon as I move into our new house in June. Yeah, Matt and I bought a house! It has a pool. A POOL!!! And a room for a most excellent art studio with a ton of sun!! Can’t wait to hang all of Matt’s old broken skateboard decks everywhere. A post for another day….

I barely have time to write in this blog or update the site. I’m not the type to do personal work at my job, and besides, I’m way too busy to do it if I wanted to! The commute is long, I have a life, etc. etc. excuses excuses. Well, now I’m going to be converting my entire site to work off the WordPress platform. Will be designing and coding it myself. Might set up a store for the art. I’m doing it to learn WP theme design and because I like a challenge. Silly me. I’m looking forward to it…

I haven’t posted anything in a long time. What’s been going on? Well, for one thing, I’ve been slogging through the Javascript Essential Training series of tutorials by Dori Smith on Lynda.com. It’s an excellent series, and I feel that I understand Javascript at its most fundamental level. Dori rocks and I like her sense of humor. I’m not sure I could write my own code straight from scratch, but I can at least implement existing code and tailor it to my needs. But it’s not my intention to be a Javascript programmer anyway, as my focus will be on aesthetic design and CSS. I’m an art girl, not a math girl, and Javascript is a bit math-y. But at least I can move foward with it a bit, and probably start learning some jQuery soon.

I am also reading DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith in addition to the Lynda.com tuts. I take the book with me on the train and follow along on my laptop. It’s a solid book and I highly recommend it for the beginner who has knowledge of HTML and CSS already. I have to admit though – it’s taken me literally MONTHS to get through it. I’m not a programmer, and the Javascript language was very foreign to me. I had to keep reading and re-reading the same chapters, especially in the beginning, to get around a steep learning curve. It was an amazingly frustrating experience! But, in the end, it will be worth it.

Now, I’m going to go start learning WordPress theme building. I started dabbling a bit long ago, but decided I should learn more advanced coding skills first. With WordPress, I will also be learning PHP and more advanced CSS, as well as CMS stuff. I’ll be changing my website soon and moving all files into WordPress, instead of just having a static site with a WP blog attached to it. I built my site while learning semantic HTML and CSS a ways back, and it’s a very minimalist site, a little boring, but hey, it’s clean, valid and was a good start. Time to improve it.

So, what else is up? Got a promotion, yep. I am currently Senior Web Graphic Designer at my company. Not bad for someone who came from print design, took a break to start a painting business, got back into temping for design when the economy blew up, and studied studied and studied web technology through Lynda and other sources while doing Photoshop work for the web. It’s amazing how much stuff is out there on the web for anyone who wants to learn something. There’s just absolutely no excuse to be ignorant of anything anymore. And one doesn’t need to spend money to take a class somewhere. If you work online creating online content, why would you go anywhere else for your education?

Other stuff – wedding plans are still on and becoming more solid. We are watching the oil in the gulf with apprehension, but we aren’t freaking out yet. Islamorada is a bit far up the Keys chain and the oil might not make it there.

There is still so much to learn about WordPress.org, but this was a decent follow-up to a beginner’s knowledge. Self-Hosting a WordPress Site by Maria Langer will get you to a basic level of understanding of how WordPress.org can be installed into your existing site, and how to then use and tweak it.

Here’s my lovely certificate of completion:

So yep, I took it. And you should too!

Sweet! Another series of online tutorials finished at Lynda.com. This time, I brushed up on my CSS skills. I don’t get to use CSS every day since I use Photoshop almost exclusively for web banner design and retail product photography retouching for web. So, keeping current is a priority, and a convenient way to do it is video tutorials. Lynda.com has the best bunch out there. This recent one was CSS Positioning Best Practices by Bill Weinman. It was a good tut series, but not a whole lot of in-depth theory on positioning at all, which I expected. But I did pick up a few things I hadn’t known before. I recommend it for those who have some semantic HTML coding experience and a beginning understanding of CSS fundamentals.

So, what’s next? In this line of work, really, what’s NOT next? Time to learn all about WordPress so I can start tweaking this here blog o’ mine and designing my own themes.