This is much more corporate designing, although with a touch of irony and fun, much brighter. I first went to 4templates, a great site for html, flash, logos and business cards, as I did not want to come up with a design all by myself. So I bought this one for a couple of bucks and finished it in TWiki/NatSkin. Infact, I had to rewrite it mostly, leaving only the basic idea and colorset in place. The package I downloaded from 4templates was coded too badly and surely was not fit to cover a CMS. In addition its imagery was targeted at a medical site, not an internet consultancy. However, I really liked the original design and its potential to be quite appropriate.

Well, and then I went out and bought the michaeldaumconsulting.com domain to get away with using the wikiring.de domain for my own business. While the primary brand of this site is MD Consulting, the WikiRing will only be used as a secondary branding, as required by the Terms of Business for WikiRing partners.

I moved over all the content and user accounts from the old JojoWiki blog in here as I didn't want to cut that off and all blogging happening here from now on will be in direct continuation of what was there, a mix of business related and personal news and opinions.

So while the old JojoWiki site was a blog foremost, the MD Consulting site is much more of an corporate site, which happens to integrate a blog as well.

I am not sure what I will do with the old JojoWiki theme. Maybe I am going to open source it as part of the NatSkin package.

Ok, so this all is quite fresh and the MD theme for this site is not quite finished with some rough edges here and there. For those of you that use the NatSkinStyleBrowser to explore available designs you will experience that the markup of the current site does not fit 100% the standard css of NatSkin. That's mostly due to the reworked header art and logos for the MD theme. I will find a way around this soon.

Last not least a message to all you rss feed readers: come along and visit this site ... and drop me a line of what you think.

For quite some time we had Michael Heilmann's Kubrick for TWiki on JojoWiki with varying header art. Yes, and as the NatSkin is being installed out there, they all use it, mostly with little customizations. So what is it worth to have a site that everybody else has too? Nuttin. All other NatSkin styles are still those from good'ol CopyCatSkin: MovableType remakes in the end. And even MovableType has lots of nicer themes now. Alright, those that come with NatSkin are fine just to see what you can do with it. But I just found out that NatSkin is much more flexible than I thought ... as you can see.

So welcome to the JojoWikiStyle (maybe I rename it to BlackWater or something). But I most probably will not bundle it with NatSkin. Not now. This is mine.

The blonder WikiRing, the darker JojoWiki.

The tagline of the site is actually ``24 ways to impress your friends''. But in fact they publish articles on web design and techniques one on every day till Christmas. What a great idea! And every day it is the turn of someone else well known in the blog sphere. Alright, there are other people too that are not in the blogging business that would have to say a lot about that stuff, i.e. comming from the online content management world. But since bloggers are much more connected to the web technically and attitude-wise, they are likely to come up with something like that. Plus, this is not focused on a specific product but covers a variety of (hype) issues like ajax, scriptaculous (animated html widgets), dom scripting, css, form accessibility etc. Let's see what comes up the next days ... and who's penning it.

If you are - like me - about to write a blog application then this piece of writing summarizes and comments prevalent blog features and their usability account.

Jakob Nielsen is cited as "the guru of web page usability" (The New York Times), "the king of usability" (Internet Magazine) and "the world's leading expert on Web usability" (U.S. News & World Report) among others. His bio adds up more to the same round dance. Visit his own site at http://www.useit.com/ and see if it lives up to its standards.

Design is about taste and elegance and usability, even more true for web pages that someone has to look at, read and ... use. Make your visitors feel good. Tell him, that you care about straightforwardness by easing his experience on the site. At least try to. Don't alienate him with hard to use ugly pages. In the end a bad site is an insult.

All NatSkin styles have been armed to take a header background image. Three of them have got example background images (find out yourself) already loaded. Actually some css must change too to make the stuff we pack into the topbar still readable. Hence we will add a skin state controling an extra css file that loads the background and changes some colors accordingly. I.e. colors will switch back to their default if the topbar image is toggled off. Things will be just like for the other skin state aspects. Well, we'll see. Right now I hard coded them in including the required css changes that come with the pictures.

Things are a little more complicated if the page layout is much more flexible compared to a fixed width layout like in most WordPress installations. The combinations of topbar images and styles will be limitted here too and only serve as examples that you most propably will customize anyway. So we will add one optional image for each style that only works with that style.

If you are looking for nice HeaderArt then visit Digital Westex. They've got tons of downloadable graphic resources. Ok, the images are made for WordPress but hey, you are a hobby gimper, aren't you.