Site History

Since 2005, Darren Hoyt Dot Com has been a blog about CSS, content management, client relations and all aspects of front-end web design.

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September 2008

• Mon 1^st

  All the Way Down

  At the swimming pool, Wistar and I sometimes poke around in the filters to see what animal carnage might be swirling around. Usually it’s frogs, Japanese beetles, dragonflies, grasshoppers or some combination. This is especially true during summer storms, like this week’s heavy rainfall which surely killed hundreds of animals unlucky enough to be trapped in small spaces.

August 2008

• Wed 27^th

  Back to School Sale on Mimbo Pro

  On September 1^st, Pro Theme Design will be having a 30% off sale on all copies of Mimbo Pro. How does it work? Follow my Twitter feed and be on the lookout for a tweet containing the special coupon code. The sale only lasts 24 hrs, so mark your calendars.

• Mon 25^th

  Creating Custom Listings with Expression Engine, Part I

  Compared to just three years ago, more and more of Category 4′s small-business clients have become comfortable maintaining their own website via CMS. We’ve built many of these sites with WordPress which clients have overwhelmingly loved. But more and more, larger projects require finely-tuned content management and custom data-types that can be diversely displayed. The obvious choice lately has become Expression Engine.

June 2008

• Tue 24^th

  Designing for the Empty-Handed Client

  I’m in the midst of a drafting a long post titled “Making the Most of Mediocre Content”. As you could guess, it’s about molding client-submitted materials into something more organized, focused and attractive. But what happens when a client has nothing to submit — no photos, no taglines, no logos, no text, no identity?

• Wed 11^th

  Displaying Related Category and Author Content in WordPress

  View any single-post page from Mimbo Pro and you’ll notice two sidebar modules called “More from this category” and “More from this author”. Learn why they’re valuable for keeping visitors on your site longer.

• Tue 3^rd

  The Rise of Visual Browsing

  This time last year at the annual TED conference, Microsoft Live Labs demoed an immersive media-browsing tool that literally caused gasps in the audience. Seadragon/Photosynth is exactly the kind of ’3-D web’ experience people were hyping in the late 1990s, along with VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), as though they were poised to go mainstream.

May 2008

• Mon 26^th

  New Design Article Up at Fadtastic

  Andrew Faulkner’s excellent design journal Fadtastic has published something I wrote last month called, “Getting Design Approval: The Single Mockup Theory“. It’s essentially an argument for convincing clients that exploring one focused design direction works better than chasing down multiple concepts.

• Fri 23^rd

  A Site Redesign for Spring 2008

  After taking a break these past few weeks, I decided to reboot the blog and point it in a new direction. Part of the motivation was a desire for something warmer, more spacious and more readable to accommodate longer bits of writing and tutorials. As for the shorter bits, I’m also posting links to Twitter. I still want this site to be a ‘final destination’ for readers rather than an index of outsourced content as Zeldman has noted.

April 2008

• Wed 9^th

  Ultimate Baseball Theme for WordPress Released

  In the spirit of Probama, Category 4 has released another niche theme (Ultimate Baseball) which comes with enough control panels options to be optimized for almost any purpose…

• Sun 6^th

  An e-Book on Building Magazine Layouts with WordPress

  Aisling from Art-Careers.com has released her own e-Book called Sites that Soar. It’s written from the perspective of a non-web designer customizing a theme for the first time, specifically based around Mimbo and Branford Magazine, featuring tons of screenshots and easy to understand explanations. This is not a paid review, just something I thought was cool and potentially helpful for Wordpress beginners…

• Sun 6^th

  Join the Mimbo Pro Google Group or Become an Affiliate

  There is now a Google Group for users who purchase Mimbo Pro and want to receive info on upgrades and fixes. Simply sign up and include your order number, browse the updates, and be sure to tick the “receive email updates” option. Users who have already purchased the theme should be receiving an email in the next few days…

• Wed 2^nd

  TimThumb PHP Script Released

  The custom image-resize script (TimThumb) created for Mimbo Pro is now available as an open-source project! It’s already being used by a handful of other theme designers and I look forward to seeing what other folks do with it…

• Tue 1^st

  Spirit of '98 WordPress Theme Released

  Spirit of ’98 is a Wordpress theme that borrows the hottest design techniques from a decade ago and makes them even hotter. The /images/ folder comes packed with buttons, bullets and animations, while custom control panel options allow for additional beveling and border thickness.

March 2008

• Tue 18^th

  Seeking Freelance Designers to Customize the Mimbo Family

  Since the free version of Mimbo launched back in August, I’ve been getting 3-4 queries a week from users willing to pay for small customizations. Now since Mimbo Pro has launched, I’m getting customization requests for both themes. Unfortunately with a full-time job and all free time dedicated to Mimbo Pro, I have no time for any new side-work.

• Sun 16^th

  Premium Themes Should Advance the WordPress Community

  If you read Wikinomics, you’ll remember the story of a mining company called GoldCorp which was poised to fail due to a vital lack of information and resources. GoldCorp’s CEO became inspired by Linus Torvalds and eventually opened up his company’s research to the greater public, throwing open what is ordinarily a very closed and secretive process.

• Sun 16^th

  WordPress Dream Theme Review

  Ben Cope got in touch at the beginning of the year about having his Wordpress Dream Theme reviewed but unfortunately it overlapped (underlapped, more accurately) with the planning and development for Mimbo Pro. Regrettable that it took me over two months to do a write-up, but hopefully better late than never…

• Thu 13^th

  Mimbo Pro, The Day After

  Just wanted to thank everyone for the nice reviews on Mimbo Pro so far, and also for their patience today. As mentioned before, Plimus, which manages the secure transactions and affiliate stuff, takes a fairly proactive stance toward fraud and spam. As a result, they hand-process the first batch of orders to ensure all transactions are legitimate….

• Wed 12^th

  Mimbo Pro Magazine Theme Released

  Mimbo Pro is a powerful and feature-rich theme for Wordpress, developed by Darren Hoyt and Ben Gillbanks and released through Ben’s Pro Theme Design marketplace…