“Thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Beg, borrow, or buy a Blue Beanie and snap a photo of your mug wearing the blue. (Or get creative with Photoshop). Then on November 30, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, (and any other social network) and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group … watch for more information coming soon.

Tweetups and Beanie-ups are being planned all over the globe … watch for more information coming soon…

see also http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2009/ ”

I always wear a blue hat (beanie?) but this one is special.

Here’s a great article by Scott Stratten at UnMarketing which sheds some light on how you can use Twitter to help engage a local market.

Designed specifically for small and medium business marketers, graphic designers, and web developers, Concept Feedback provides a simple tool to get quality feedback on marketing concepts. Best of all, it’s 100% FREE!

There is a full review at Fuel Your Creativity.

I’ve just had my second look at Umbraco, an ASP.Net content management system (CMS). When I first stumbled on Umbraco about a year ago, I misunderstood the license agreement to mean that in order to use the open source version of the software, you were required to put “Powered by Umbraco” on the home page of the site.  After a closer look, reveals that this is not true. The only Umbraco branding that you’re stuck with is in the control panel. This works just fine for my purpose which is to give my clients a framework within which they can edit their own content.

The main feature of Umbraco that has me excited is the text editor. It uses TinyMCE as do many CMS packages. The difference I’ve found from some of the others (such as InsiteCreation) is that Umbraco gives you full control over the editor in terms of what buttons are displayed to the person doing the editing. This way, you can completely hide the Font and Font Size buttons which will effectively eliminate the problem of people inserting Font Size inline styles or worse, font attributes directly into the markup.  As an example, the editor within InsiteCreation will actually insert “<span style=”font-style:italic”>” instead of simple <em> tags.

The other factor which I LOVE is that the designer has full control over the markup that the editor outputs. This makes it easy to maintain the standards compliance of the markup of the site without the need to coach your client in the nuances of editing standards based html using the editor.

I’ll post more on Umbraco as I get more deeply involved, but my initial response is extremely positive. If you call and talk to me about content management in the near future, we’ll likely be discussing Umbraco.

Creative burnout happens to all of us. As a creature of habit, I tend to get into a routine and stick to it. After several weeks of sitting in the same chair in the same office day after day, I can feel the creativity slowly ebb.

The answer is to get out of the office (or wherever it is you usually work). It doesn’t matter if it’s for a few hours or a few days, but a regular change of environment is essential to keeping your creative edge.

Regularly getting away from your familiar routine can pay big dividends by refreshing your perspective. If you sit in the same chair every day, your eyes tend to rest on comfortable, familiar objects. As soon as you move out to the back garden, or the coffee shop, your eyes will have a whole new palette of stimulus. It’s not only visual; that rose bush in the garden, or the low hum of conversation and music in the coffee shop can give your nose and ears a fresh perspective as well.

In the case of public spaces, you have the added advantage of possibly meeting and talking with new people. Sometimes, just being near enough to overhear some conversation can give you new perspective on a design problem.

I came into design from a photography background, so one of my favorite things to do to spark creativity is to take my camera out and seek out patterns, textures, colors, interface elements, or whatever strikes my fancy. Doing this in the real world instead of on the web gives the whole process a much more organic feel.

I like to plan several trips with my wife during the year where we go find a small town, stay in a bed and breakfast or hotel (an Internet connection reduces stress for me on these trips). Then, we just spend two or three days either hiking local trails, or walking the streets and browsing shops in the town. During these trips, I always try to see things as much as possible through  the lens of my camera. It narrows my focus and helps me isolate interesting design elements. Invariably, I return from a weekend trip with a fresh perspective and a recharged creative battery.

As an ASP.Net developer, my web servers run IIS. Until recently, that has meant that I have been limited to using ASP.Net apps for custom blogs, CMS software, etc. Now, with the advent of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer, the choices have expanded to include several PHP/MySql options including WordPress. I’ll save discussion of the Web Platform Installer for another post, but suffice to say, it’s wonderful to have the option of running something like WordPress or Drupal locally in an IIS server.

I’ve chosen to use WordPress as my blogging platform. I’ve used BlogEngine in the past and have a couple of clients using it regularly and it really is pretty excellent, but it can’t compare in terms of user experience, available plug-ins, and community to WordPress. The one thing that might make me think twice is the ability to customize the core code. Since I work in ASP.Net and not PHP, it would be much easier for me to add custom functionality to something like BlogEngine. However, the fact is, there are so many available plug-ins and widgets for WordPress that I don’t foresee the need to do any custom programming.

The entire interface for WordPress is very user-friendly. I’ve had little or no difficulty finding my way around the back-end, installing plug-ins and juggling widgets in my sidebar. There is a huge amount of well-written documentation, so searching for and finding answers to common questions is a breeze.

Creating a custom theme is actually a little trickier in WordPress than some of the other blog packages, but it is fairly straight forward once you get a hold on which file is which. The system makes it easy to produce a theme that is W3C standards-compliant, and accessible.

I think that a lot of people make the mistake of trying to bend WordPress into a full content management system (CMS). It’s not designed to be a CMS, but for a simple web site, depending on what features you need, it can suffice very well. It allows you to create static pages and create a menu for them within your theme as well as in the sidebar via a widget.

The text editor is very easy to use and produces lightweight standards-compliant code- no <span style="font-style: italic;"></span>" where simple <em></em>> tags will do! Uploading and managing images and video is a breeze.

All in all, I’m very happy with WordPress. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of what is available within the WordPress community in terms of information and plug-ins. It may well be that as I learn more, I’ll find more that I don’t like, but so far, it’s all good.

As you can see above, my name is Jack Wheeler and I’m a free-lance web designer located in Eugene, Oregon. My skills are weighted toward graphic front-end design, xhtml and css;  however, I also do quite a bit of ASP.Net programming. I am very passionate about web standards and accessibility.

In the blog, I hope to write about current trends and events pertaining to web design and development as well as some articles targeted toward web site owners.

This new re-design of the BlueHatDesign site will include a more up-to-date portfolio and a more personal approach to my work.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!