FINISHED!

I'm finished. Finished with my new site, and finished with this blog. If you'd like to say a few words in mourning, now is the time. Really, the blog is just moving to a new location. To pick up right where you left off, just go to my site (www.zachwoomer.com). Hope to hear from you there! Read this post >>

It's Coming, and I Love it When it Comes

Yes, and it's glorious.


Alright, I'll give the double entendres a rest for a minute. So, I'm finally going to take the leap. I've been messing around a lot with a little something called WordPress. I've really been interested in learning a CMS and converting my site to one such system. WordPress seems to be the way to go. I was looking into Joomla! before, but it turns out that wasn't the one for me. But, I'm in the process of learning WordPress now and converting my site, and thanks to the help of Web Designer Wall's Wordpress Theme Guide, things are going rather smoothly. Which means this blog, and my portfolio site, will soon be living under one roof. Living under one roof and giving crack to all the neighborhood kids. Just a little though, until they're hooked, then it's $500 a pop.

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5 Awsomely Awesome Resource Sites

Here's 5 sites I visit every day. These 5 sites hold all the resources and information you can cram into that 3 to 4 pound head of yours.



1. w3schools


I'll start off with the most useful. This is essentially the site I used to learn how to build websites. It has on it information and tutorials on pretty much every kind of code there is. If you ever felt the need to learn programming so you can hack in, reprogram a spaceship and use it to pick up girls and joyride to the moon, this is where you'd go to do it. The best part by far is the interactive online demos you can mess with that show you exactly what the code does you're trying to learn. It really gets me hot and bothered.


2. Fudgegraphics | For Lovers


Looking for free photoshop brushes or textures and a sexy good time? This is the place to go. It may be because this site perfectly reflects the style I like to work in, but I feel Fudgegraphics has some of the best quality brushes and textures you can find, hands down and ass up. Not to mention some of the other content, such as the featured artists, gives for some excellent inspiration.


3. Smashing Magazine


This site really covers a lot of bases, which is why I like it so much. It covers different web trends and practices used today, tutorials, freebies (textures and what not), and ideas to help your work go smoother and more efficiently. It's the all in one, swiss army knife of design blogs.


4. Web Designer Wall


I mainly go to this site for inspiration, because it features a wide variety of sites, all the time. From minimal to text heavy, all sorts. But it also has some interesting articles now and again as well. All and all it's a nice little fun fest, and the person that runs it (Nick La) has some other great sites as well.


5. DesignM.ag


I use this site mainly for textures and some sweet ass photoshop actions. And I mean sweet. Cross processing? Forgetaboutit. It also has designer interviews which is how I stumbled across Fudgegraphics. Thank the lord. This site really is a masterful thing, full of inspiration, free design tools and some straight up magic. Be amazed.


Bonus: FFFFound


Ever find yourself in a rut trying to come up with a url? Just keep repeating the first letter until it shows up as available. This site is effing awesome. And I'm not talking "seeing some dolphins by your boat when your sea fishing" awesome, I'm talking "the Battlestar Galactica picking you up at your home and taking you to Ruby Tuesdays where you'll do shots with Katee Sackhoff" awesome. This site is so full of inspiration, I can't even stand it. I truly believe too much of it will give you cancer. Basically, this is a site that you become a member of, then whenever you come across something on the web that looks cool you add it to this site and tag it according to the content. A site devoted to things that people think look cool is pretty much the best inspiration you're going to get.


And there you have it.

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Firefox Add-ons That are Sweet as Hell

The browser that I use on a daily basis is Firefox. In my opinion Firefox is one of the leading browsers out there today. Not only for the fact they handle web standards like a sexy dream, but they have some of the sweetest wed development add-ons I've ever laid my innocent eyes on.



1. Web Developer Toolbar

This add-on is by far the most useful. There are so many things you can do with it that I haven't even explored yet. What I use it for is a learning tool of sorts. When I come across a site that I'm curious as to how the designer accomplished a certain effect, I use this toolbar to check out the css file. Or I use the toolbar to outline frames to figure out layout problems. Just the multitude of useful things this toolbar does is like a 60 year old hooker, you know she's been around the block and you'll definitely get your moneys worth. Except in this case, it would be like a 60 year old hooker that costs nothing.

2. ColorZilla

This is a handy little tool that gives you the hex value of any color you see on a web page. Like that pretty orange color you see on that pornographic site you visit in the mornings before work, you can now easily copy the hex value of that color and implement it into your own pornographic sites. It also helps when your testing your own sites and you would like a text to be the same color as the banner at the top of your page, you can easily get it this way in a jiffy, instead of having to open up the photoshop file, wait for it to load, and wanting to end your life.

3. Screengrab!

This is one of my favorites. While building my own website, I wanted to have nice screen shots of the different sites that I had built. Instead of taking a screen shot and having the bottom of a site cut off, or having to scroll down to take another screen shot so I could piece them together, this sweet sweet add-on allowed me to either get a copy of or save a shot of the entire window. Yes, be amazed at the power of this add-on and the amazing abilities of my run-on sentences. You could also get a shot of just the viewable part of the window if you so desire, but I mainly use it for whole window shots.


So that's it. These are add-ons I have for Firefox that I use on a daily basis and they make a few parts of my job just that much easier. If anything, get the Web Developer Toolbar. I've learned so much with just that tool alone. It taught me how to be a man, and enlightened me to some of the finer points in life. But the others are definitely a great help as well. These three add-ons should be gotten as a package, because I assure you'll find good use of all of them at one point or another. The Ninja Turtles wouldn't be so good if Raphael was the only one. It would be The Ninja Turtle, and he would probably get his ass beat all the time, and live at home in his mother's basement until his late 60's.


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Weekly Art...of Death!

This is my art, and it is also the middle of the week, making it the art of the week.


While reading an article about zombies on cracked.com, which was hilarious (you can find it here), I got the idea to do a piece like this. It didn't turn out at all like I was picturing it but does it ever? Anyways, since flesh eating zombie monsters are going to eat the meat tissue off our onlooking faces soon anyways, you might as well look at this, and like it, then face your impending doom.

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For the Love of the Game

Well, I wanted to put this up just for the sake of posting something I guess. It's some artwork I did whilst I was attending college.



I did this for my girlfriend (that's her with the tree on her head) as a sort of going away present when we were graduating, despite the fact that I live with her now. It was during my whole "Ralph Steadman" phase, which is the phase I'm always in when working with ink. This was me just playing around, and I had a lot of fun with it. It's ink, watercolor and colored pencil on canvas. I blew the ink around then drew whatever I saw in the random splatters of ink (I apologize that on this copy it's sort of hard to see some of the finer details, but you get the idea). I did some photoshop work once I got it onto the computer just to give it some texture. I really need to get back to the basics soon. I've had a blank piece of canvas sitting around the house for months now, and it stops me in the hall every so often and asks me why it's so empty inside.

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Spicy Web Designers

I was just interviewed for this spicy site.


Luc Arnold of Spicy Web Designers recently contacted me about an interview, and I obliged. (Check it out!) The site is great and it's chockablock full of interviews by professional and up and coming web designers. It's a really inspiring place, and you get to see a little background of some very interesting people. Can you dig it?

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Current Events

It's been a busy ass week.



Tons of shitty shit piling up. I had a flash presentation I had to put together for Harbortouch's trade show later on this month. Plus I'm completely re-designing they're new POS software and making an ISO site for them. Also, I recently got some freelance work to make a photography portfolio site. But, she wants the ability to add pictures to her own site and also to be able to let people order their prints off her site. So, I need to learn a little thing called a "content management system." From what I've looked into so far, it looks like Joomla is the way I'm going to go. Well, keep an eye out because once I learn Joomla and whatever else I need to learn, I'll post a tutorial up on here. Or at least the best explanation my tiny brain can manage.

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Sensei Zachariah Says...

Just 8 short months ago, I was hired at United Bank Card for web design. There was just one problem, I had no idea how to design things on the web outside of dropping a damn flash movie into dreamweaver and uploading it. And for a big corporation like this, that just wasn't going to cut it. So I had to learn the ins and outs of web design and I had to do it fast. There's no better way to learn about something than to dive in ass first. I looked all over the web, with some help from friends and co-workers, and found a few sites that were a huge-tastic help, and I'm going to share these sites with you now in a pastel rainbow type effect.


1. www.w3schools.com

- This site was the most helpful as far as learning the basics. Any type of coding that's used on the web (html, xhtml, css, javascript, etc.) can be found there. And each section has tutorials you can play with right there on the site. It couldn't get any better than if it took me out on a date and whispered sweet sweet nothings in my ear. I also keep this site handy whenever I run into something I don't know. It truly is one of the best sites for learning the trade there is, and it's free. Need I say more?


2. www.lynda.com

- When I first started at UBC there was another web designer here, Emily (who's since moved on to bigger and better things) and she showed me this site. You have to pay a subscription fee for this site but she had a company subscription through UBC. This site is full of video tutorials which really helps a lot if you're one of those people who needs to be actually shown how to do something before it sticks. But, it's sort of lacking in the fact you have to up your subscription to be able to download the files for the tutorials so you can actually follow along with the videos. I was stuck just spectating. So this site, though helpful, didn't help me as much as others. Though, it may be a different story for you.


3. www.webdesignerwall.com

- This tasty morsel is one of my favorites. This would be more for after you've gotten the hang of actually making sites. It's full of little tutorials, trends, inspiration and gives you a look at what other designers are doing. It's a very interesting site and is really focused on content for people who just love design. Two thumbs up and a wink. (Also, there is www.bestwebgallery.com, which is maintained by the same guy, Nick La)

That's pretty much it on the sites that I visit regularly. These sites usually provide me with whatever I need. And if you can't find what you need at one of these sites, then there's always Google. Either way, I hope these help you because they sure as hell helped me. These sites fill all the fuzzy warm places in my heart. Enjoy!

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