You may follow the progress of the work at the Ycademy Demo Site which features the Semiomantics XO Theme.

Looking forward to seeing you on YorgoLive tonight.

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Time again to monitor and check the performance of our new WP based Semiomantics XO 2012 Script on search engines.

Here’s a screenshot of yesterday’s post “Portraits of Africa 2012″ on Google – have a look! Positions 1, 2, 3 and 6 ahead of 10,800,000 search returns – YEBO GOGO!

When looking up “Portraits of Africa 2012″ on Google, I also checked how the images in my article were ranked – here’s the detail of the screenshot showing the Image of a “Young African Girl” on position one, followed by the Image of a “Young African Boy” on position 4… and a small ad I created ages ago peeking at us on position 2. All of them ahead of our South African presidents… just too funny! The young generation is on the move!

It becomes even more intrigueing when we look up “Portrait of Africa Images” on Google and find these young faces of Africa featuring amongst some really classy photography! And again… the random positioning is just too weird… for those who read this and understand what I mean! Welcome to the future :)

Fact is, that with the increasing importance of images and media on the Internet – and with this for our website development – … and people preferring to look at something for quick grasping of the contents rather than reading long time-consuming – and even worse: thought-provoking -  texts… that the correct tagging and classification of photos and images becomes more important. Here as with any post what counts is to be found on Google – Google Top 10 that is. Noone else looks further…

Congratulations to our young friends who’ve made it to the top ranks and find themselves in interesting and attractive company! There will be more….

Young African Girl from my series “Portraits of Africa 2012″.

Portraits of Africa 2012 – untouched… straight from my simple NIKON Coolpix P90 … just the magic of a Young African Girl.

Although the black & white version adds a specific note, I preferred to show the soft gold tones of the skin.

Within my photo series “Portraits of Africa” here is the image of a young African boy.

I just love Black & White Photography and how it adds depth to a picture, especially portraits and expressive faces.

“Portraits of Africa” are shot on a simple NIKON Coolpix P90 with a minimum of post-editing, ideally nothing at all.

We are pleased to announce that the Conference Services website  “Hakamela Conferencing & Event Management” will soon be under construction on Semiomantics XO 2012.

Hakamela Conferencing & Event Management will open its doors in Pretoria, South Africa. This high-demand Service Company  will be run by professional Conference Management Expert Lynn Sakuinje.

Web Design South Africa will be designing a simple, practical and user-friendly website that will target top 10 positions on Google under the relevant keywords and focuses on high visibility on the mobile web.

We are living in times of rapid change and the explosion of the mobile market. People use their mobile phones to search the net, to find what they want, to compare it and – to buy it. Sales figures triggered via the mobile net are staggering – and as web designers we have to adapt – which means also to focus on new technologies and learn new languages.

Over the past years, Semiomantics has always evolved along with WordPress Developments. Remarkably, the latest WP update allows for much more creativity. While our Semiomantics based author blogs display perfectly on smartphones through integration of the right plugins and settings, there’s much more scope that we will be looking into at this weekend’s Ycademy Seminar 2012 – which is also a testing ground for the new Semiomantics XO 2012 – to be released soon.

In that sense, I am looking forward to the evolution of Bianca Gubalke Mobile!

In order to follow and implement Web Design Trends 2012, learning new languages like CSS3 and html5 has become crucial – especially also due to the unfortunate conflicts around Flash which cannot be seen on the exploding mobile market. Accordingly, this weekend’s fully online YCADEMY Seminar will need focused attention and strong nerves! That’s the price to pay to be and remain a qualified Semiomantics expert!

MadMax is ready – are YOU?!

I just got some screenshots directly from the iPhone in Europe to demonstrate how the new Monkey Valley Resort Website actually looks on the Mobile web – and I’m absolutely thrilled! The quality and resolution are just outstanding and I left the image big so you can appreciate it here even though the picture may take a moment to load. This is soooo sexy!

Above, you see the Frontpage of the Monkey Valley Resort Website, which features a large elegant slider displaying the various chapters and attractions of the hotel resort 30 kms out of Cape Town, South Africa. What is remarkable here is how beautifully the slider displays – all based on new technology as, sadly, Flash does not display on mobile phones and this forced us to adapt in our Semiomantics Website Development, learning new languages like CSS3 and HTML5.

Much if not most of today’s business on the Internet is piped in one way or another through the mobile web… a reason why Monkey Valley Resort had to be visible on mobile.

Here is a horizontal version (probably 1 : 1) … and of course you can zoom up text or whatever you are interested in… and get to where you want to go in a fast and user-friendly way, eg. Click and BOOK!

The Importance of Functionality in terms of Website Design has a lot to do with the ease and user-friendly interaction between the website and the website visitor: the website has to communicate to the visitor what it is all about in an attractive way, guiding through what it has to offer and fulfilling almost intuitively what the visitor is looking for and making it easy to follow through with the desired action – say to book a room in a hotel…, to buy, pay and even download say an ebook… or to simply offer various sights of a specific area or place that shows the visitor what he can expect, eg. in a holiday resort or when researching a new home in real estate.

Today, being visible on the mobile web is crucial to the success of any website or Internet business – and therefore one of the most important functionalities of a website or blog.

Nowhere more than on the Internet do we see such rapid and continuous change and do we have to adapt, learn new languages and keep developing our knowledge and skills on an ongoing basis as in the virtual arena. A website or blog is not built to last forever and it needs a regular allocation of funds (budget) – it’s a project in constant development, adapting to the changes, changing with the trends and always trying to offer readers and visitors something new, something modern and going the extra mile to capture the traffic that leads to business and success.

In very simple terms: Responsive Web Design aims to display content adapted to the visitors screen size. This means namely that the layout width must be fluid, i.e. expressed as a percentage of the width of the screen, typefaces expressed in em and images must be scalable.

Responsive WordPress Theme XO by Semiomantics

Practically speaking: a responsive designs can be viewed on a smart-phone or on a large PC screen, the display will always be the same and adapted to the size of the screen or browser window. n stead of using multiple style-sheets for different screen sizes, designers use Media Queries which allow to create multiple layouts using the same content. To achieve scalability, CSS media queries, such as min-width or orientation are used.

A quick and easy way consists in creating a child theme; this allows you to upgrade your theme as the case may be without altering your customizations.

1. Create a new folder in your wp-content/themes folder and name it anything you like; for the purpose of this exercise I call it “responsive”

2. Create a style sheet in your new Child Theme folder (call it styles.css).

3. Suppose your main theme is called “wptheme”; paste the following into style.css

/* Theme Name: wptheme Child Theme URI: http://www.yourdomain.com/ Description: Child theme for wptheme Author: Your Name Author URI: http://www.yourdomain.com Template: wptheme Version:1.0 */

The only line you really need to respect is Template:wptheme; this line refers to the parent theme folder.

4. Import the parent themes style-sheet by adding now the following line to your new style.css:

@import url(“../wptheme/style.css”);

5. Define the screen sizes you design for. (Smart-phones, tablets, PC) To test the result we just create different h1 color values for the different screen sizes:

Having set these basic parameters, you can now apply styles and layout values to taste, such as vertical navigation display on small screens.

To make images responsive we will need to take some WordPress specifics into account and there fore we will intervene with CSS3 and Media Queries and modify styles.css and functions.php of our theme.

Add the following to your style-sheet to make images scalable:

Now the images will be re-sized to fit horizontally, while the vertical scaling is still defined by WordPress. We need to remove WordPress image height and width values to scale our images proportionally.

In WP, image classes come with a with and height properties; we delete these properties like so:

change in your WP editor:

to this:

This will work for your post and page images, however not for the images created by WP dynamically, such as post thumbnails. We need to delete with and height properties dynamically with a function.

Add to functions.php:

Now you need to make a final modification in your template and replace:

with the following:

That’s all!

Hopefully the above will help you to do additional customization wok and as the case may be, to adapt your great themes to the requirements of 2012 Web Design.

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As “Publishing for Excellence” at “Web Design with Passion” demands consistent learning, experimenting, an adaptation to trends and almost daily reassurance of the script’s leading SEO performance, the global Semiomantics Team is currently testing the new script and exploring different ways of presenting themselves or their products and services online.

I am very pleased with the more adventurous ways we can explore with the new Semiomantics XO 2012 for WordPress… and I know we haven’t even started! I am looking forward to creating the Wedding Website on this extraordinary WordPress based script.

With sliders being an important part of the Trend 2012 as Website Design and “the Look” are concerned, I am currently experimenting with a fading slider – although extremely frustrating with often failing Internet connections and extremely slow lines down here… it feels like the sun flare is targeting us specifically and knocking us out completely!

Besides using sliders in the header or sidebar widgets or even blog posts and pages, we can now use them even in the background – which opens a lot more creative options and perspective.

At the Ycademy Seminar, we will work on becoming familiar with the new features of the XO 2012 and improve our knowledge of CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery so we are in a position to ‘play’ with the script, explore new avenues and, last but not least, adapt XO to our customers’ needs.

To be continued. . .