Lyrical Media » Blog http://www.lyricalmedia.com Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:28:59 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Our new site is bigger, bolder, and better than ever! http://www.lyricalmedia.com/our-new-site-is-bigger-bolder-and-better-than-ever/ http://www.lyricalmedia.com/our-new-site-is-bigger-bolder-and-better-than-ever/#comments Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:37:15 +0000 John http://localhost:8888/lyricalmedia.com/V2/testing/?p=53 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> lyricalmedia

Congratulations! You made it all the way here, to our brand new site which is (hopefully) a huge improvement on the old one. This bad-boy has been about a month in the making, notably the last 3 days pretty much flat out, but it’s now finally here and ready for you to see and comment on. I’m still ironing out a couple of bugs with Internet Explorer, but they should be all gone within the next couple of days.

The Story So Far

The old site was only 8 months old, and not that bad to look at really – but it suffered from one rather big problem: loading times. Due to the complexity of the design I had to use two HUGE transparent 24 bit PNG format images, which clocked in at *cough* 500kb each *cough*.

That, combined with rather heavy use of Sifr, meant that the site often took over 30 seconds to load. Not cool.

As we’ve now moved full-tilt in to Wordpress development as our primary service, this new site is built entirely on the Wordpress platform. There are very few images in use & as a result it runs much, much quicker than its predecessor.

The Concept

I wanted to do something outside the box for our little headquarters, so I really tried to shy away from current trends of gradients and drop-shadows on absolutely everything. I wanted to do something that was completely different.

Inspiration struck whilst reading a copy of .NET Magazine one day, and I decided to see how well I could translate print-style design onto the web. The result of this was the very simple homepage which you see today, the attention to detail on text and image layout, and the different layout for almost every page on the site.

The CSS file was the longest I’ve ever written, coming in at 12,298 characters of hand-written code.

The Main Feature

So the home page looks like a magazine cover, and as such it’s going to be different (almost) every month! Every time I post a featured article it will be listed in big bold writing on the home page, along with a big vector-style graphic in the center of the page.

I might see if I can get different colour themes going on a monthly basis too, but this’ll need a bit more research before I start making any promises.

The JQuery

This site has been my first experience with writing JQuery from scratch and I have to say I’m loving it so far. It’s extremely intuitive and easy to understand if you’ve got a strong grasp of CSS.

To see the bits I’m talking about first-hand, head on over to the services page and click on the big blue button at the top, (if your screen is big enough it’ll almost look like 2 pages of a magazine side by side) or check out the about page and try the big blue button on the left-hand side.

What’s next?

I’ve been blogging a huge amount over at my person blog on john.onolan.org and with the new design I’m also going to really pick up the blog frequency over here at Lyrical Media. With a brand new site to work with and a lot of big plans for 2009 I’m hoping to deliver some interesting and insightful content that will keep you coming back for more.

A semi-monthly newsletter with industry news and lots of discounts is next on the cards, so look out for that one in the near future. In the mean time – I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new site!

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]]> http://www.lyricalmedia.com/our-new-site-is-bigger-bolder-and-better-than-ever/feed/ 26 Win A Free Copy of Billings http://www.lyricalmedia.com/win-a-free-copy-of-billings/ http://www.lyricalmedia.com/win-a-free-copy-of-billings/#comments Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:38:49 +0000 John http://www.lyricalmedia.com/?p=151 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> billings

If you head on over to john.onolan.org very, very quickly, there are still a few hours left for you to win your very own free copy of Billings for Mac, which is a fantastic invoice management program that has made my life a lot easier these last few months.

All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is head on over, “tweet” a message, and leave a comment – that’s it! The competition was supposed to close today, but I’m going to keep it open just till the morning to give a few more people a chance to win this great piece of software.

If you’re writing down your client estimates on napkins, or struggelling to organise everything in MS Word or Excel – then you definitely need Billings.

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]]> http://www.lyricalmedia.com/win-a-free-copy-of-billings/feed/ 2 Find Us On Twitter! http://www.lyricalmedia.com/find-us-on-twitter/ http://www.lyricalmedia.com/find-us-on-twitter/#comments Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:02:29 +0000 John http://www.lyricalmedia.com/?p=155 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> twitter

We’ve been on Twitter for a while now but we haven’t been nearly active enough! From now on I’m really going to give the Lyrical Media profile some more attention. To start off with this will take place in the form of a brand spanking new custom Twitter background – then we’ll move onto building up some more followers and interacting with all of you.

You can find Lyrical Media on Twitter here, please follow the profile and shoot across a message, you’ll be followed back! (promise)

If you’d like us to follow you but it hasn’t happened yet – leave a comment on this post and I’ll get right on it for you. Feel free to leave any other recommendations for great people to follow as well!

Until next time!

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