The Caveena Solutions Blog
Congratulations to Royal Brunei Airlines for receiving the 2014 REBRAND 100 Distinction for their rebranding efforts! I like the new look but then again I’ve always been a fan of simplicity & clean designs.
Yet another major social network changes its user interface. Torches are on your right, pitchforks on your left.
In all seriousness though, the redesign is predominantly cosmetic to unify the experience over different devices. And although it adopts influences from Flat Design it doesn’t fully embrace it — *meh* fonts and all.
I always appreciate a simpler, cleaner design. So no arguments from me.
I ran a test update on a client’s WordPress website using our test environment and was surprised to see that updating to WordPress 3.8.1 killed all permalinks. Not good. The website used WooCommerce and after some investigation I managed to find a work-around: completely delete WooCommerce and re-install it. This will require you to reconfigure WooCommerce in the back-end Administration. None of my products appeared to have been touched so that’s a plus.
As of writing, WooCommerce is officially compatible with WordPress up to 3.7.1 with 4 people saying the plugin is broken in 3.8.1. That ought to be sufficient warning but the support forum only has a couple complaints. One thread even identified the issue as a conflict with Yoast SEO.
I figure there must have been some conflict with the page routing because not only were WooCommerce pages throwing a 404 but ordinary WordPress pages were as well. When I fell back on WordPress’ default hyperlink structure, everything was hunky-dory. Since Yoast SEO also has options affecting permalink structure, I wouldn’t be surprised if this and plugins like it would further complicate the issue.
If your WordPress website is using permalinks and you find that updating to 3.8.1 causes pages to throw 404 errors, I hope this helps you.
I’ve long felt that designs you see around Brunei are dated. Heck, I’m one to talk — I only recently flattened the design of this here website! So I think the Ministry of Health should be applauded for the design of their posters promoting Bru-HIMS and the Health Promotion Centre.
Happy Chinese New Year! May we all receive blessings of happiness, health & prosperity in the coming new year!
This year I decided to decorate the old website with something festive for the occasion. You’ve got your regular red lanterns and oranges but this being the Year of the Horse I thought I’d do something… different.
Well, what else did you expect when you crossed a horse and a bird? Because if it ain’t a Pegasus I’d love to know what it is.
Icon Design
OK, let’s deal with the elephant, erm Pony, in the room: the icon is based on Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. With that out of the way, let’s talk about the design of the icon itself.
First of all, being an icon I wanted a clean, simple design. If you’ve seen any pictures from the show (or ahem watch it on occasion) you’ll notice the art style is very clean which makes it not only suitable for icons but also relatively easy to render in vector format. Look no further than DeviantArt for proof.
At the same time, I knew I had to maintain the shape of a horse. No point celebrating The Year of the Horse without the horse. That’d be like going on honeymoon without enjoying some honey *wink wink*. My first choice was to use Fluttershy but her silhouette just did not work: I found her long hair ruined the horse outline I was going for. Rainbow Dash on the other hand has shorter hair which simplified the entire process.
Finally, the wings had to come through clearly enough. I mean, it’s a link to Twitter for crying out loud so this horse had to fly! Fortunately, there are many instances of Rainbow Dash flying that I could use as a base for the icon and we eventually ended up with this:
It took less time than I thought to flatten the look of this website. I know we’re a bit late to the party but I really thought it was going to take longer than it did. All I had to do was comment out the CSS3 gradients, remove some borders, straighten out the rounded corners and substitute a font or two. Thank goodness for LESS, I say.
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A while back I updated this website and switched out some of the png files with their svg equivalent. What I forgot to do was render the fonts in my logo as paths before uploading the svg file.
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When rolling out a News Section on a WordPress website, would it be better to use a Custom Post Type?
A friendly reminder to please resize your images before including them on your website. Needlessly large images will slow down your website irking visitors and upsetting your Google web search ranking.
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