Official Re-design

I’m calling this version 5.0 of Electric Weekend even though I’ve been through a few different sets of clothes in the past. Although it is not a theme I have coded entirely myself, but a modified version of Depo Clean, I’m still really pleased with it. I’ve altered added and changed a fair amount of things, had to work out how to achieve various different things and really expanded my knowledge of PHP and CSS to the extent where it certainly feels like my own theme and not a stock one.

So why the new skin?

Well, two things caused me to re-do my blog. The first was being hacked and the upgrade to version 2.2 of Wordpress. The upgrade broke the theme I had running which was a slightly skinned version of K2, and whilst there was a fix about, I wanted something that I could call mine and was less obviously a Wordpress blog. In the mean time I chose a quick theme modded it slightly and you have been seeing that for the past few weeks. That slight mod was always going to be a stand in and as a result I had to really think about re-designing.

The second cause for the re-design was my graduation from Uni. The next few weeks and in fact the last couple as well, will result in me sending off stuff to studios, attending exhibitions and just generally trying to get a job. Now, for quite a while I have been top of the Google search for Phil Bowell, so I wanted my blog to be somewhere that I was pleased to own and that I didn’t mind industry people viewing. With that in mind there are a couple of new bits to the site.

So what’s new?

The most significant new section of the site is the addition of a portfolio page. It currently has two projects on it, but a couple more will be coming in the next few weeks. This has been added for two reasons. One being if people from studios find this humble bit of the internet it has some work on as a confirmation they have found the right Phil Bowell. The second is that until I find a job in a studio I am looking to pick up as much freelance work as I can, so I needed to have somewhere I could show off some of my stuff. I did intend on buying philbowell.com but decided rather than try and drum up visitors for a fresh site, I should utilise the portal I have here, incase one of my many subscribers wants some design work doing or knows of someone who does. As an extension to this I have seperated the about page and contact page, so it’s even easier for people to get in contact with me.

The archives page has also been altered. I used to run the Extended Live Archives plugin on my blog, but for quite a while I’ve wanted to change that. Thankfully I found a much cleaner and simpler archives plugin which isn’t as complicated as the ELA were. Please drop me some feedback about it.

The about page has also received a bit of a revision. I’ve updated the content of it, which to be honest I think has been there for a year and was quite out of date. There is one thing which I want to add to it, a picture of me, but I haven’t yet found a suitable image so I might have to get something taken specially for this place.

Is that everything?

I think that just about covers everything. I hope you like it, I do and I feel quite pleased to finally have something a bit more lasting in place.

I really like what you have done with the place; I especially like your portfolio page and the designs inside it! I think that they’re cool!

I think that the archives are really good too, they make it nice, neat and orderly, plus they look cool at the same time.

But yeah, all told, great job with the place, I really like it

Thanks Aidan glad you like it. The Archives plugin can be found at this website, realised I didn’t put it in the post.

Cheers Phil I will look into getting that. Although my Google Sitemap plugin kind of does the same job, but it isn’t as fancy as the archives plugin lol.

Hey, I really like it, I love DePo. I also love that quote by Da Vinci.

looks fantastic!

@Nick, I only recently found that quote, but I felt it sums up the way I design perfectly! Depo is a great theme and a great basis to build a design on.

@Rabsteen, thanks, glad you like it.

[...] Electric Weekend gets a redisgn. [...]

It looks stellar, Phil. I like it a lot.

Thanks Shawn, glad you like it!

Agreed. Very nicely executed!

Thanks Ben!

I’ve actually just noticed and error on the flickr images, in Firefox they have a dark border around the grey but I don’t know why! Any ideas?

Look at this line here:

.flickr img {
width: 80px;
height: 80px;
margin: 1px 5px;
padding: 5px;
background: #ddd;
}

If you get rid of the padding: 5px; and the background: #ddd; you should be good to go.

No, I was wrong. Just put this line of CSs into the bottom of your stylesheet:

.flickr a img {
border:none !important;
}

Thanks Ben, I will give that a try.

Hey Phil,
Great site. Love the clean look.

I was wondering if you could help me add the bottom columns to my theme which is a mod of Grid Focus. You can see that I’ve tried to do it through adding a table, but it looks… well, pitiful. If you’ve no time, no problem!