WordPress 3.0

Archive: ‘business’

WordPress 3.0

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

We recently moved our website to a new hosting company StableHost (fyi, that’s an affiliate link) because we found a good deal. We were at nearlyfreespeech.net before, which was affordable, but the performance was sometimes a little slow. Hopefully you’ll notice a speedup in browsing our site! Also, I had problems with updating the WordPress software and the plugins

Speaking of updates, we updated this blog to WordPress 3.0 (Theolonius) as well. There are a host of nice improvements, though I’m not sure what we’ll implement yet. I think we might do something with custom menus, depending which theme we go with. And the bulk updating of plugins will be nice too.

Also, I’ve been playing around with Facebook connect. If you’re logged into Facebook, you can “Like” any of our posts now! I might add Facebook commenting, but then it doesn’t work for those few people not on Facebook As always, stop by our Facebook page sometime!

Posted in blog, business | No Comments »

Why Does Custom Photography Cost More

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Marianne Drenthe has written an informative article on “Why Does Custom Photography Cost More?”

We here at Chang² Studios strive to provide a better experience. In fact, those who compare our prices against those at a typical mall store may find that the mall store costs much more in the end for an inferior product!

Tags: comparison, cost, photography, price
Posted in business | No Comments »

Package Design

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

So as a graphic designer, I not only want our photography to be perfect, I want our packaging to stand out to people when they receive their DVD with all of their images on it.

We have come a long way for the image on the DVD its self, from just burning a disk, to printing on the disk, to printing on high quality, water resistant DVD’s that look just as good as a DVD you can buy from the store, if not better.

We have also come a long with the presentation of the package, from a regular jewel case, to a simple square envelope, to petal paper from Paper Source secured with a button tied through the envelope to hold the disk down so that it does not get any scratches during shipping.

I like the overall look at this time, but I do feel there is a slight problem with how people understand it. I feel that it is a little bit of a complex design. When someone receives this package they open the petal, which is great! But then they seem to be a little puzzled about what to do next. I need to step back as a designer and see its functionality. So the next step is to untie the bow, but I see many confused faces when we hand deliver the DVDs. Do you have any suggestions? We would still like to use our crafty materials, because the look is perfect! Function is important too.

Tags: bow, button, cd, customer, design, disk, dvd, packaging, paper, paper source, petal, photography, ribbon, tie, water resistant
Posted in business, photography, wedding | 1 Comment »

Move to WordPress

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I’ve moved the blog to wordpress! My previous host software was blogger, but WordPress was more flexible and people say that it does better with search engines (go SEO!). It wasn’t too difficult, though I took the more adventurous path by downloading the software from wordpress.org and setting up the blog on my own site. If you want an easier solution, wordpress.com offers free blogging, it’s not as flexible. I imported the old posts, but I’m still learning how to customize the blog.

Here are three features I like about WordPress so far:

Nicer looking. I started off looking for blogger templates, but the really cool ones seemed to be for other services, such as WordPress. However, even wordpress.com only has a limited selection, so I went with wordpress.org for the fullest flexibility.
Easier static pages. I don’t know how to do this in blogger, but a quick “add new” button in WordPress lets them show up in menus and in the side bars.
Plugins and widgets! I like being able to extend the functionality. Already, I’ve added a contact page with the contactform7 plugin.

I could see how people could base entire websites off of just a WordPress site with some tweaking!

Posted in blog, business | 2 Comments »