Maintenance week #5

Design3 min readView on GitHub

Maintenance weeks are where detail website tasks, instead of a regular post. I spend time fixing bugs, updating grammar and posts in general, as well as adding featured images. It varies what I will do, and this posts serves as detailing what has been done.

So while it’s not a post that directly gives value, it helps me keep on top of the library of content that I am acquiring.

Focusing on the newsletter

It had become clear I wasn’t getting any closer to completing a download to go with subscribing to the newsletter. I spent this week working on this as much as I could.

Colour and icons
Input fields make up the majority of forms, in slightly differing variations
Those fields have an individual state based on validation or focus
Checkbox, radio & switch styles
Buttons with variety

Working on it infrequently was getting nowhere fast. As a subscriber it’s important that I repay that. So I am working on a form UI kit, it will be both Illustrator ready, and coded up for you to use. It will use much of the experience I’ve had with forms over the years to get a consistent style everywhere.

This is something I expect to expand upon over time, so I’m making it part of a git repository to keep track of what changes.

Small layout change to entries

I’ve moved the titles below the images, I feel like this is a better balance to the page. I want to adjust the title/image area quite a lot over the coming weeks to try add a more editorial/interesting spin on the layout.

Portfolio

/portfolio was originally where I had that, but recently I’ve begun to put one together on Adobe Portfolio at stevemckinney.net.

As a few visitors still somehow find their way there, I needed to put something to direct to the right place.

A featured image for these posts

Slowly but surely I’m getting into the rhythm of making these. I go back and forth with the style, but it’s a good way to practice illustrative styles.

CMS updates

It’s always important to keep your CMS up to date.

It has been relatively bug free

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more bugs. I’m aware of one with pagination, but that requires a frustrating rework. It’s an intermittent bug, so I’m not sure it’s worth the time investment.

There’s also some spacing issues in search results. This one again is tricky, as the search results share the same markup as the archive listing.


I’m a tea drinker, but it’s equally appreciated if you found the article useful.

Get the articles

It’s my aim to help you be a better designer. Join my monthlyish email list and I’ll send new tutorials to help you design & code beautiful websites. You can unsubscribe anytime.