Yesterday I uploaded my new website. This new website is built with WordPress and it uses the TwentyTen default template.

There are a couple of reasons why I decided to use WordPress, one of which is its ease of use. When I first built my old website I used a CMS, which at the time, was easy-to-use and did everything I needed it to do. But as my site grew and I decided to add a blog to it, the old CMS did not have a blog option so I added WordPress.

By adding WordPress, when it became time to update my website with new artwork I would have to update the old CMS and WordPress. This wasn’t a big deal at the time but what I started noticing was WordPress was more search engine friendly than my old CMS. Let me give you an example, in the world of search engine optimization one of the key elements are search engine friendly URLs. A search engine friendly URL will have keywords in all lower case and dashes separating each word. With my old CMS I had keywords in the URL but I also had special characters such as a question mark.

Example:

Now in these examples you can see the difference. They went to the same page but the WordPress URL is much more search engine friendly. Always keep in mind that search engines try to index everything whether you have a good URL structure or bad URL structure but where the differences come into play is when a search engine is trying to decide which website to put higher in the search results. Google looks at over 200 things when it’s comparing websites so what you want your site to do is to look less imperfect than your competitor.

Other things that I looked at with WordPress is that it’s very user-friendly, I actually use it over on AutomotiveArtists.com. Another great thing about WordPress is that it has great user support. In the process of converting my website over I had questions, a lot of them. One of my biggest questions is that since I had so many pages already made in the blog section all I wanted to do was add my art pages to WordPress but I didn’t want them to be in the blog section. This is where the great user support comes from, any time I had a question I did a search and someone out there already had an answer. Being able to quickly find answers to my questions really helped me out.

As far as the template design I went with the default TwentyTen template and made minor tweaks to it. I always liked this template, it just has a nice clean look about it.

Another deciding factor was page load speed. Recently Google came out with a page where you can test your page load speed. This page load speed ranks how quickly your page downloads on the scale from 0 to 100. When I first tried it on my old website I thought my website loaded pretty fast so I was expecting a high score. The score I got was a 60 but when I tested the WordPress blog version of my website I got an 89. So I started testing other websites that I have, some that are built in plain HTML and a couple of others made in WordPress. It seemed the WordPress sites always ranked higher than my non-WordPress websites. Test your site’s page load speed.

The thing that I’m doing now is setting up 301 redirects from my old CMS’s URLs over to the new WordPress URLs. As with most things with WordPress they have a plug-in that can help you do most anything, in this case they have a redirect plug-in that is helping me manage all my redirects. Anytime you change your URL structure, in this case going from an old website to the new website, it’s good to put in 301 redirects. Not only does this help users who click on an old link come to your new page but it also tells the search engines that you have permanently moved the old page to a new URL.

So now everything is set and I can get back to doing artwork. I got a couple of new things I want to show you but I didn’t want to post anything because if I posted it on the old side I had to transfer to the new site.

Anyway I hope you like the new site, that’s where I’ve been for the last couple weeks getting 135 pages transfered over, working on a test server and then moving everything back over.

Thanks, greg

I think everything has been cleared up now. So if you tried to get to my site and couldn’t, or tried to email me and it got returned, the web server going down was the problem.

I had seven sites on that server and what helped me is that I use web hosts that have the popular control panel called cPanel. cPanel has a backup utility that also helps restore your site when you move. I just needed to find another host using the same control panel.

Remember to do your backups on your site in case this ever happens to you.

Thanks for hanging in there with me!!
–greg

Steve Nicholson over at Auto Restoration 101 contacted me to let me know about an article he did on me and my artwork. Steve has over 20 years experience in antique auto restoration and street rod fabrication. His work has been featured and displayed at SEMA, Good Guys, Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance, and much more.

Steve also runs a couple of sites, one of which is his art site “Just for the Art of it“. There he displays all kinds of cool items which he makes from recycled parts, like the Oldsmobile timing gear and valve spring wall clock that is painted tangerine.

One of my favorites is the Spark Plug hubcap clock. It’s made from an aluminum hubcap and has 12 spark plugs that represent the hours.

He has these and other items for sale on his Etsy.com site.

Thanks for the article Steve!!

It’s amazing the detail he puts into these kits. You can see images of all twelve in the Finkster Forum on EdRothWorld.com.

Weldon has also put together a poster made up of photos of these models. He sent me one and they are really cool! Check out his Ebay auction.

He sent me a link to Purdue University’s website. On their website is a page showing the corporate partners for the Industrial Advisory Board. Sandwiched in between the Ford logo and Honeywell logo you’ll see the All American Dynamics logo.

Not only is it impressive to see the logo you designed with these big names, but is also impressive to see someone you know on such a board. Very cool, Steve!

This is a photo from Michael Paul Smith’s photo set on Flickr. What’s impressive about this photo is that the cars and the buildings are models. He takes these amazing photos of car models without the help of Photoshop. He says he uses the oldest trick in the special effects book and that is to line up the model with an appropriate background.

See the rest of his photos here on his slideshow.

Chris Duke of Motorz posted on his Facebook page a request for anyone to Photoshop Peter of “Family Guy” onto his new “Season 3″ photo.

Chris is a cool guy that I have gotten to know on Facebook and from his show Motorz so I thought I would take him up on his request.

The trick was getting the shirt to fit around Peter’s neck in a natural looking way. After a few tweaks here and there I was pleased with how it turned out.

Chris just posted an article titled “Photoshop The Host” with all the details. See the image I did at the top of the page beside Chris’s picture and at the top of the images below.

You can give it a try too, he has details on his website. Whether you do artwork or not check out Chris’s videos on Motorz. You can also check him out on Facebook and Twitter.

Smart Car Drifting in Japan

The new 2010 Mustang Customizer is out and it is one of the best configurators I have played with this year.

So what makes this configurator better than the others? First of all it has lots of options. Options for the car, options for the background and also options for different effects you can apply to the car like a burnout, dirt, and smoke.

The other nice thing is that it loads fast. Sometimes when configurators have as many options as this one, it will take forever to load.

The one little thing I think could have been done better is the parts side navigation. I kept having to chase down the “selected parts” link once the box resized itself. It would be great if it stayed the same size or either expanded just from the top down.

It also has nice share options so you show your friends what you created. Here is a link to one of the Mustangs I did. If you go and create one, come back and post it in the comments so I can check it out.

The basic idea with these setting is that the higher the setting, the better the image quality and the lower the setting the lower the quality. Along with the image quality is the file size. The higher the setting also means a larger file size and lower the setting means a smaller file size.

The balance is to have the best image quality with the lowest possible file size.

So a common practice, and one I have used over the years, was to go with a middle-of-the-road setting of 50. That way you got good image quality without having a file that was large and made your site load slow.

I recently came across this great article from Sergey Chikuyonok that I wanted to share called “Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques“.

The thing that stood out for me in this article was when Sergey wrote that when you save an image in Photoshop under 50, it uses an additional optimization algorithm, so if you are saving an image that has small, high-contrast details it is better to set the quality setting to at least 51.

In the article, there are some images to show you the difference between that 50 and 51 quality setting. You will be surprised at the difference.