Welcome!

I am a freelance web/graphic designer in the Sacramento area. I have more than a decade of experience in the web/graphic design industry and I absolutely love what I do. I have been a full time freelance designer since 2005, and that freedom has made me love my job even more.

I work directly with individual clients or companies, and I also frequently work with design firms and agencies on a project by project basis. My rates are competitive, I offer quick turnaround time and flexible hours.

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I will sit down with you – at no charge – and discuss your objectives. Together we will determine the best plan to achieve your goals within your budget.

Recent Articles

• Modern SEO
• Ditching PayPal?
• The Evolution of the CMS
• HTML to WordPress conversion
• The Importance Of Mood Boards

Modern SEO

This is a very informative article about how SEO is changing. It gives some good advice on the best ways to adapt to these changes.

6 Best Practices for Modern SEO

Ditching PayPal?

When PayPal came out (more than 13 years ago) it was an innovative, inexpensive and ground-breaking service. As a web designer, I was thrilled. But as time went on and technology and the internet began growing by leaps and bounds, I started to lose faith in PayPal. I have recently decided to stop accepting PayPal as forms of payment for my business for many different reasons — the main one being, they won’t give me access to my money. (This kind of defeats the purpose of getting paid I think…) Anyway, all that aside, I found this interesting article today that provides a few alternatives. Check it out and decide for yourself.

Why You Should Ditch PayPal and Use These Other Services to Send People Money

The Evolution of the CMS

This is a great article from CMS Wire. Granted, it was written last year, but the information is still helpful — especially the last bit on what a CMS “Must” provide. The internet and everything associated with it is constantly changing and growing. It’s hard to keep up sometimes. Thank goodness there are articles like this out there to help point us in the right direction.

2010 Web CMS Trends from Industry Analysts

HTML to WordPress conversion

After months of configuring, editing, revising and testing, we have finally launched the new WordPress site for Sacramento Professional Facilitators – www.topspf.org. The online registration was a challenge but I found a workable combination of plug-ins and widgets that solved most of our issues and gave us a very functional registration process that is easy to maintain. All in all, this was a challenging but fun project!

The Importance Of Mood Boards

What is a Mood Board?
A mood board is a collection of colors, textures, typography and graphics that help a designer define the look and feel of a website. A mood board can be a drawing, painting, collage, illustrator document or a photoshop file – the process doesn’t really matter. It is the concept or “mood” that you want to focus on.

Why is a Mood Board important?
The client has given you their thoughts and ideas on how they would like their website to look. So why waste time on a mood board? First of all, creating a mood board is anything but a waste of time. It is actually a great way to save time — and frustration. Most clients are not designers. They have an idea, but they don’t know how to execute that idea. That is why they have hired you. It is your job as the designer to take your clients thoughts and ideas and compile them into a creative, workable, user-friendly interface. Don’t just try to give them what they want. Give them something that they didn’t know they could have.

Creating a mood board will not only help give you as a designer a clearer vision of the end product, but it will give your client more confidence in your ability to help them achieve their goals.

WordPress How-To: Getting To Know The Admin Area (basics)

Your WordPress site is finished!! Yay!! Now what??
This article is an overview of the admin area of WordPress. The intention of this article is to help familiarize you with WordPress so that you can navigate through the site easily. I will be writing a more detailed tutorial on how to create pages, posts and other nifty WordPress functions in the very near future, so check back soon!

In this overview, I will explain how to log into your site, what the purpose of the dashboard is and the functionality of each of the navigation/menu items.

Logging in to your WordPress site
Your WordPress log in page can most likely be found here: http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-login.php (http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin should also work).

The Dashboard
Once you are logged in to WordPress, the first page you will see is called the Dashboard. From the Dashboard you have access to every part of your WordPress site. At the top, you will see your Website name on the left and a set of quick links on the right. There are many helpful quick links on the Dashboard. Some of the main features are:

• WordPress and Plugin updates. When a WordPress software update is released, you will see a notification in the top bar of your Dashboard page as well as a circled number icon at the top of the left sidebar. Plugin updates are indicated by a circled number icon next to the Plugins menu link in the left sidebar.
• Recent Comments. Anytime someone comments on one of your blog posts, you will see a notification in the middle of the Dashboard page under Recent Comments. You can approve, delete, edit or report the comment as Spam from this area.
• QuickPress. The QuickPress area is located on the right. This is a place for you to quickly create and publish a post without having to browse to the Post section. You can also quickly navigate to the New Post, New Page, Drafts, Uploads or Comments sections via the quick links in the top bar to the right.

The other sections in the main area of the Dashboard include: a Recent Drafts area – If you have a draft saved it will be listed in that area. You can quickly click on the link and it will take you to the post for editing or publishing; An Incoming Links section that will show you if someone has bookmarked one of your posts or placed your link on a different website; and a few areas that keep you updated on recent WordPress and Plugin news.

Left Sidebar Menu Items
The left sidebar is your main navigation area. This sidebar is displayed on each page and does not change. Clicking on a main item will 1) bring you to that section and 2) display sub menu options. There is an arrow next to each main item that will allow you to hide or show all of the sub menu items. I will briefly go over each of the menu items and what they do. For a more detailed tutorial on the functionality of each item, watch for more WordPress tutorials coming soon.

• Posts
  The Posts menu item will take you to a list of all the posts that you have created. This list will include both published posts and drafts. Clicking on a title will take you to that post where you can edit, delete or publish your post. The Posts sub menu items are: Add New – this will automatically open a new post template, Categories – This is where you can add or edit your categories, Post Tags – This is where you can add or edit the tags that you want associated with your posts.
• Media
  The Media Library is a list of all the images, videos, etc. that are uploaded to your site via the admin area. The Media sub menu items are self-explanatory. Library is the list of images, etc. and Add New will allow you to upload new media.
• Links
  If you have a Links page (also called a Blogroll), this is where you will add, edit or delete your links. Again, the sub menu items are fairly self-explanatory. Add New lets you add a new link and Link Categories lets you create new categories for your links.
  Note: The blogroll is where you link to the blogs you read frequently – a friendly way of acknowledging the good blogs out there.
• Pages
  Just like the Posts menu item, the Pages menu item displays a list of all the pages in your site. Pages are different than Posts. Pages are for static content such as Contact Us or About Us. They do not change or cycle through like a Post does. There is only one sub menu item for Pages and that is Add New. This opens up a template that allows you to create a new page.
  NOTE: For more information on Pages, visit the WordPress.org website.
• Comments
  This is a list of all the comments that have been posted to your site or submitted and are awaiting approval. There are no sub menu items under Comments.
• Appearance
  This is where all the different Themes associated with your site live. You can install themes from this area or activate themes that are already installed. Unless you know what you are doing, it is not a good idea to make any changes to this area. The sub menu items for Appearance are Widgets, Menus, Background, Header and Editor. (I will be posting a more detailed explanation of each of these areas soon!)
• Plugins
  This displays a list of Plugins that are installed. It will display both active and inactive plugins. This is another area that I recommend leaving alone unless you know what you are doing.
• Users
  This is the area that will show you a list of all the users on your site. You can assign roles and add or remove users from this area. The sub menu items are Add New and Your Profile. Add New is.. well self-explanatory. Your Profile is where you can edit your own profile information. By default all users, except the main admin, are assigned the rolls of Subscriber. The Your Profile section will be available to all users, however, none of the other sections will be available.
• Tools
  This is another one of those – Only if you know what you are doing sections.
• Settings
  There is quite a bit of information under Settings. However, you will not need to change most of it. First of all, the General Settings are for the site title and tagline, email address, default user roles, time-zones, etc. You should NOT change the WordPress address (URL) or the Site Address (URL). Changing this can lock you out of your site. The other sub menu items are Writing, Reading, Discussion, Media, Privacy, Permalinks and Dropdown Menu. Read through each of them to customize your settings. After the standard sub menu items, you will also see various plugin links here. For example, Featured Posts List and jQuery Lightbox plugins both appear under Settings. Other plugin items may also appear as additional main menu links after Settings. Some examples are Contact Form 7 and NextGEN Photo Gallery plugins.

Add New
That does it for the main menu links. Now I would like to backtrack a little and explain the Add New Posts and Add New Pages links. When you click on the Add New link for either Posts or Pages, you get a “fill-in-the-blanks” type of template page. Some of the features on this page can be moved around and/or hidden via the Screen Options so if you do not see something that I am explaining, you might find it in the top bar under Screen Options at the top right of the page.

The first field is your Page or Post title. Underneath that is your main body content area. This is where you will write your post or place the content for your page. This area has two different views: Visual and HTML. You can switch views by clicking the tab to the upper right of the main content area. Unless you know html, I would suggest keeping it in Visual mode.

Below that is the Excerpt area. This area allows you to use a custom excerpt in place of the default 50 word excerpt that WordPress creates from your content. Then we have Custom Fields area that allows you to create custom fields, the Discussion area that allows you to turn comments on and off for each individual Post or Page, an Author dropdown that allows you to change the Author of a Post or Page (Admin is the default author).

To the right, you have your Publishing settings. From here you can either Publish a Post or Page or save it as a draft. You can also edit the publish date and set the visibility settings to private or public. You also have the option of making your Post “stick”. Any post that is set to “stick” will always display at the top of the main blog page.

Below the Publish settings you have Categories. This is where you can assign categories to your Posts. The other two items below Categories are Post Tags and Featured Image. This allows you to assign tags and images to this post.

The Add New Page area is very similar to the Add New Post area, but it does have a few differences. The main difference is the addition of the Page Attributes box on the right and the lack of a Categories box. (You cannot assign Categories to a page.)

The Page Attributes allows you to set your page as a main (Parent) page — this is the default setting — or set it as a sub (Child) page underneath another Parent Page. For example, if you have an About Us section and want to display Bio information for each of your employees, you can create a page for each of them and set the Parent Page for each to About Us. You can also set different templates for each page however, you must have a template created and installed in order to use this feature. Your webmaster will be able to help you with this. The last part of the Page Attributes box is the page Order. This is important for the navigation on your site. If you want to display the pages in a certain order, you need to specify the order number here. Otherwise, the default order is the order in which the pages were created.

So there you have it – you now know a little more about the Admin Area of your WordPress site.

If you have any questions or feel that I have overlooked something, please feel free to comment below.

Superheroes Unite!

It’s a shame that people can’t really have super powers – but that doesn’t mean we can’t be Superheroes! And that is exactly what I am doing. I have been officially invited to join the SacYES Superhero team. The SacYES Superhero Team is composed of local leaders in marketing and media (SacYES’s own personal “superheroes”) who are willing to donate a few hours of their time each month to helping support youth development in their community.

SacYES is currently experiencing rapid growth, with increasing demands for youth made videos and youth led trainings. The SacYES Superhero Team will help propel them from a small youth start up to a nationally recognized model for a youth run enterprise. Watch this video (Made by SacYES) to learn more about SacYES:

What is SacYES? from SacYES on Vimeo.

Freelancers Vs. Agencies

It’s true that in this industry, you get what you pay for. But that doesn’t mean you have to break the bank to get what you want. Agencies charge a higher rate because they have more over-head. When you hire me to create your website or design your marketing materials, you are getting the best of both worlds. With over a decade of experience, I have the expertise of an agency but since I work for myself, I can give you a more personalized experience and offer a lower, more competitive rate. (Ask me about a discounted rate if you are a non-profit or 501(c).)