Design

Looking for a great set of professional quality metal layer styles? Well, fire up your copy of Photoshop, today's your lucky day!

Introducing my latest project, MetalWorks Pro! Featuring 140 high-quality metal layer styles and 20 seamless metal textures, MetalWorks has everything you need for your next design project!

MetalWorks features just about every type of metal style you could imagine: brilliant gold, brushed aluminum, rusted iron, tarnished silver, classic copper, sharpened steel, and polished chrome, to name a few. MetalWorks is available for download now, so be sure to check it out!

Last week, I launched my latest Drupal-powered startup, a niche e-commerce site selling Photoshop Layer Styles.

Today, I published a full case study over on Drupal.org. The study includes my thoughts on using Zen vs building from scratch, how I set up the multi-column content layout, and some tips on tweaking your server for maximum performance.

So, if you're interested in learning a bit about how I build sites, be sure to check it out, and leave a comment if you have any questions.

Whether you're troubleshooting your site's CSS or editing your template files, there are all kinds of free tools available that can help improve your productivity.

In this article, I'll show you a few of the free web design and development tools I use on a regular basis.

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I've updated the portfolio list on my Drupal Themes page to include a Drupal site I built for The University of British Columbia's MiNa Group.

You can find more details about the site in the Drupal Showcase.

I was recently hired by SEOposition to update their contributed theme for Drupal 5. Essentially, I rewrote the entire theme from scratch: The CSS and XHTML are all brand new, there's a new navigation bar, improved typography, and the theme itself is about 200px wider.

Overall, the code is much tighter, and quicker to download. If you're upgrading from the 4.x version, you'll see a significant decrease in bandwidth usage. Here's an overview of the bandwidth-saving improvements I was able to make:

• Rewritten CSS is 60% lighter. Old version used over 15k of code, I did it in 6k.
• New XHTML layout is 25% lighter, easier to read, with better SEO.
• Optimized images now have 40% smaller file sizes without sacrificing quality.

Here's a screenshot of the new 5.x version:

The updated theme is now available for download from the official Drupal site. Please note that the information on that page still referrers to the old 4.7 release, all admin screen issues have been resolved in the new Drupal 5 version.

If you have an old theme you'd like updated to Drupal 5, be sure to check out my Drupal theme services.

As an experiment, I've added some Google AdSense to the site. I'm not expecting much in terms of revenue, but you never know... Actually, this is more of an educational experience; I want to better understand the methods behind Google's madness. Maybe you do, too?

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