Paul Burgess - Freelance web designer

Firefox Add-on for weheartit.com

I have built a Firefox Add-on (sometimes known as an ‘extension’) for the popular website We Heart It.

We Heart It is a popular visual bookmarking site, a place where people can save images they find on the web for inspiration or simply to keep your favourite images.

Members add images to their account by using a ‘bookmarklet’ which is a button they drag to their bookmarks bar on their browser, which when clicked highlights all images on a webpage that you can submit.

Whilst this works, the conceopt of bookmarketlets is often tricky for users to grasp, and highlighting most images on a page can prove quite disruptive to your browsing.

I thought that this would be the perfect scenario for a Firefox add-on, that would let you right click an image and submit it to We Heart It. So I entered the mysterious world of building Firefox add-ons. A task which lacks any real documentation and, for me anyway, relies a lot on trial and error.

There are 3 conditions to submitting an image to We Heart It, the image has to be over a certain size, it has to be on a webpage and cannot already be on weheartit.com. After a lot of fiddling about, I managed to create an add-on which complies with these rules and seems to work just right.

The add-on is currently being downloaded and tested by We Heart It users, and was announced on Twitter yesterday. I hope that it will become a ‘official’ part of the site in the future.

You can download and install the addon on the Firefox Add-ons website and find out more about We Heart It on weheartit.com/about.

Wednesday, 4th Nov 2009 | Link »

Website and social media hub for the 1indienation podcast

I was asked by LA podcaster and princess of social media, Rachael Depp, to design and build a website for her, after she saw one of my personal projects, delarge.co.uk

Initially she wanted a custom design for somewhere to host her podcast, 1indienation. We also used the site as a one-stop shop for all her social media accounts (such as 12seconds, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook).

Taking this route meant the site acts as an overview of all of her online activity using RSS feeds. It brings all the seperate accounts into one place and updates automatically as she add photos, videos and tweets. It also serves as a place to download and listen to her music podcast.

I was given the logo as a starting point and designed the overall site to reflect her lively and colourful attitude.

Visit 1indienation.com »

Website for men's fashion label Denison Boston

I was asked to produce a small website for men’s fashion accessory label, Denison Boston.

This is a site to accompany their main online shop, designed to give an overview of the brand. I was given website design mockups and asked to produce the site based on those.

The site is built using a Wordpress framework, which means all content is all controlled by the Denison Boston staff. This allows them to publish press releases and edit their pages as they please.

Visit denisonboston.com »

Code to grab the first image in Wordpress and show thumbnail

I recently wrote a piece of code (called a function) which you can include in Wordpress that will allow you to show a frontpage of your posts, and include a featured image as a thumbnail.

This is a popular technique amongst many modern Wordpress themes. The result could look a lot like this:

More information and all of the details of how to do it are posted up on the Theme Forest forum. I hope you find it useful.

Monday, 28th Sep 2009 | Link »