The set of photographs that come with your iPad are great. However, you might want something more. Here’s one I put together. It is, obviously, inspired by The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. To get it on you iOS device, just tap the Don’t Panic link below and and tap-and-hold when the large image appears. Then just select Save Image.

Don’t Panic – Retina quality
Don’t Panic

That image is courtesy of Nasa. You can find the original here: M82 – Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind.

By the way,
When the original iPhone came out in the UK almost 3 years ago, I put together a collection of alternative planets, just incase you got bored of the western hemisphere of Earth. you can find that here. (Yes, alternative view of the Earth is included.)

While I was building creativepractice.org.uk, Darina was in NYC with Claudia Barwell to do a short interview Ken and Terry Robinson. The interview is now live on our website at suklaa.org.

Just so it doesn’t go un-noticed, I’ve just redesigned my company’s website. You can find it at suklaa.org.

What makes the new website

As it’s often the case, these redesigns don’t come too easily; first it was a problem of finding inspiration and direction, and next it was finding time that was hard. That said, it was a pleasure to work on it. I used the fantastic Sandbox theme which is – I guess – more of a framework that gives you the basic functionality of a WordPress theme but no styling. It was a bit tricky to get all the selectors to work as I’m not that used working with dynamic CSS selectors – which Sandbox uses – but got it working in the end. One of the main aim and ideas when getting started was to use as large as possible image. Most visitor on our site will have bigger than 1024×768 screen so the front page image as well as images on individual pages are 1024 pixels wide. Most thumbnail images on the site are ‘hot’ as in when you click on them, they load a zoomed version of the image. Check them out in our company blog: Suklaa Weblog. To do that zoom effect, I’ve used FancyBox for WordPress which I think is a must have plugin on any site that needs show photographs. FancyBox is developed by Janis Skarnelis and ported to WP by José Pardilla. They’ve done a fantastic job. I’m also using Category Posts Widget which allow me to pull lists of posts from different categories. Very useful. Other that it’s all pretty basic; Ultimate Google Analytics, Google XML Sitemap and All in One SEO Pack.

Few things to do

If you had a look at the site already, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a bit of work to be done. Mainly with styling the archive and search results page as well as coming up with a better design for the blog. At the moment it needs big photos to keep the text from being too wide. Not sure what I’m going to do with it. Maybe a hand coded sidebar element that gets dropped into each post? Is there a way of using a different template for a different categories? Also links need work done so they’ll actually look like links.

What do you think of the site? Any comments?

“Again!”, you might shout, but I think you’ll find that last time I tampered with the design was last February. Years ago in Web terms.

It’s a cleaner, simpler design. One more step further away from the WordPress Default 1.5. You’ll like. I hope you will.

I’ve also added a subscribe button in the sidebar. Try clicking it. Good things will happen.

–kristian