Joshua Russell Pianist

Secret Innovations came to me about halfway through February about Joshua Russell's website. The site at the time was in need of some attention and love. The mission: completely redesign the entire site to give it a more "Web 2.0" look and a "performance" feel; then, take this design and integrate it with WordPress.

As of this project, I've cut Photoshop out of the Web design process. Truth be told, the times it was helpful were few and far between. Instead, I sketch designs in my notebook and from there go straight to (X)HTML/CSS. First I nail down the fonts I'll be using and then get the layout to match my sketch. The reason I take care of font selection first is because it can wildly change the flow of elements on a page depending on the flow, kerning, and size of the letters. The final step was to use Adobe's Kuler tool to design a beautiful (and piano-like) color scheme for the Web site.

This is the first WordPress theme I've ever designed from scratch. WordPress proved to be very easy to develop for. The online documentation was incredibly helpful and I was able to integrate the theme in a matter of hours. In fact, due to some of the complexities of the audio player and how I wanted to integrate it, I ended up writing my own PHP to integrate with the theme.

Mission accomplished! Check it out at http://www.joshuarussellpianist.com/.