Just to keep everyone informed of the happenings lately at Inkwell Design Studios. I (Zac) was recently hired at a full time position in Knoxville. I have been very busy with the new job, and have just now gotten settled in there. I will be catching up on orders from the last couples of weeks. I am very far behind, but I hope this will not hurt our working relationship. I sincerely apologize for the wait!  Over the next couple of days I will be doing all maintenance and preparing shipments (both international and domestic). To the members of 502 street scene, the white decals have been on back order for some time due to material shortages. I have received the material and will be getting these out promptly. If you have any concerns at all please contact me: zaccarter@gmail.com or mail@inkwelldesignstudios.com. I appreciate your understanding.

Today I am going to go over installing Wordpress, and making use of the software. This information is available on their website, but I am going to go a little more in depth and explain some of the things that puzzled me as a first time user. In later articles I will be going over installing skins, plug-ins, and many more of my favorite things about it’s abilities. First of all you are going to need to find a host for your website. I currently use two service providers; godaddy and dreamhost. I prefer dreamhost, because there service is great, and there tools are very user friendly. If you would like to sign up for their hosting packages please sign here: A reliable host is important to ensure your website is accessed both by customers, clients, and search engines. If it’s not up 100% of the time you could lose out on website traffic, or even worse sales. A neat way to find reliable hosting is to use the following service: find my hosting. They will give you the skinny on who is reliable, and what features they support.

That brings on the next topic; Installation requirements. Wordpress requires PHP and MySQL to run. Hosting it on an Apache will make use of the most of Wordpress Features.

After finding your host and downloading the wordpress package, you may begin installing it as outlined. To do this you need a FTP client, I use Filezilla. You can follow the instructions the wordpress team has laid out for you, but if you went with dreamhost I can show you exactly how easy it is to install. Making it even quicker than what wordpress claims to be a “5 minute installation”.

After logging into your dreamhost panel you will see the tool box it the left hand corner:

Next you will see this screen: (click for larger view)

I as a webmaster always install as an advanced user, but for the people that are just wanting to get something up fast I suggest the easy mode. In easy mode DreamHost will take care of all the upgrades and maintenance for you. The down fall to selecting Easy Mode is you can’t install any of the nifty plugin’s or theme’s that wp has available. Dreamhost does have a select few that will be installed though for you.

After clicking advance you’ll see a drop down menu:(click for larger view)

Of course you’ll select wordpress, now scroll down to where it is asking for you to put the directory in.

If you want wordpress to be installed in a directory, specify it now. For example if you plan on having a forum or catalog on your website then you would want to keep the installations separate.

http://www.octaneculture.com/wordpress or http://www.octaneculture.com/blog would work. You could then use http://www.octaneculture.com/forum or /shop for other software installs.

After putting in all the required information the Happy DreamHost robot should let you know that it will be installing the software and notifying you of a successful install. You should see the following:

Of course your domain will be different than octane culture. I am using that as our test install.

Shortly you should receive an e-mail notifying you of install. After that we can begin configuring the set up.

First of all you should create the admin user. After that we can begin installing new plugins, themes, and start adding content. I will continue on with wordpress features in future articles. In the mean time, click around and explore the layout. Get familiar with wordpress and the different features of it.

Hello and welcome to Inkwell Design Studios. We are a creative design company based in Knoxville, Tennesee. We are home to the Great Smoky Mountains as well as the Tennessee Volunteers Inkwell Design Studios specializes in web design, vinyl decals, and much more. To learn more about our services we offer please visit the about us page. We also offer a variety of decals at our shop. Please take a moment to browse around, also don’t forget to visit the various sites listed to the right. Thank you for visiting, enjoy your stay! – Zac Carter

Inkwell Design Studios has now added the track maps to the shop as promised. We currently have 2 up, but will be posting more as time goes on. Below are Nashville Super Speedway and Barber Motor Sports Park. They are $5.00 plus shipping.

Click here to order!

So today here in Knoxville we got a bit of snow, I decided to take advantage of it and draft up a concept website.

I started out with the trusty paper and pencil and went at it. Here is the end result:

(Click for larger view)

I used tennspeed, because It’s a good example of a website that has a start to product branding. They have a logo, and I currently sell their decals, at one time they used to have a similar front end portal that made it easy to access different areas of the website. There really wasn’t much inspiration to the color scheme, other than the colors of the state flag itself. Since everything was laid out in photoshop all of the elements are still able to be changed. For example, the carbon fiber at the header and footer could be changed to a different texture, elements could be added or taken away. Also the navigation column on the left could be placed on the right. This is why it’s important to lay it out in photoshop before coding.

Below is a photo of the the proposed layout in photoshop after vectorization.

(Click for larger image)

This could easily be coded up into a CMS, and used as their front end. Allowing the administrator of the website to add feeds from other websites within his network or feeds of popular threads within tennspeed itself. I’ll be using this example above in future articles, but in the mean time I would like to hear your comments on the above picture. Would this be something you think would benefit this website?

So we have went over a few key points in 2 previous articles; here and here. They should give you an idea for what is to come in the next part of the series.

Inkwell Design Studios wants you to keep the following in mind when getting ready to launch a product, website, etc.. With the invention of digital technologies, faster computers, optimized software. When is the last time you wrote a hand written letter, sketched something out, or even read a book? It’s important to break out the sketch book once and a while and clear your mind, and write down everything that pertains to your subject, it might spawn new ideas.

Usually when I begin looking to design a new project, I meet with the client and pick their brain about what they would like. What is their product? What is their service? What does their product or service do for their customer? Do they already have some sort of branding in place? Is there a color palette they want? What is their niche? These questions will get you started on giving you some kind of idea. This will also help the clients that come to me that say; “I want your services but I don’t really know what I want”. It should spark their inspiration.

So after you’ve sketched out your concept on a napkin, it’s time to add some color to it. One of my favorite tools to do this with is degraeve’s color palette generator. By putting the url of an image in it will generate a palette for you. For example, when I put in the header image from IDS into the URL field, it comes up with the following colors; #0099ff, #ff0066, #ffee00, and #eedddd. All which were used as elements in the site you are currently looking at. The three main colors came from the CMYK Color Model used by the print industry. The colors are bright, draw attention, and combine to create black. Another good resource to start at would be pantone’s website. They are the authority figure when it comes to color science, making pantone a good place to start as well.

So you’ve sketched out a rough draft by now, you’ve added color. Now its time to think of how you want to turn this into a functioning template. By now I have a good idea of what the client wants, what their product does, and what their goal is of their website. First and foremost you need web pages, these will contain the information that the customer wants to display. A few I always start with are contact, home, and about. It’s important to know how the client’s customers can get in contact with them, the home page usually contains the information about their product or products, and the about page has a biography of the client and maybe their goals. The home page can also contain a blog.

After you get a few pages of information together it’s time to construct this information into a structure that is easy to navigate, and links to all the materials. You can do this with a simple layout, using a basic html structure and a cascading style sheet. Or if you plan to have lots of content, product, literature, then it would be a good investment to structure it into a piece of software. Content Management System’s are a great way to do this. Inkwell Design Studios uses Wordpress, but there are several others out there. In later article’s I’ll be giving my readers a more in-depth look at Wordpress’s features, and it’s extensions can do.

The next step to take after getting all the above steps taken care of would be to map out the content and optimize it for the search engines. This is an entire step in itself, and it’s far to important to summarize it in a few short words. There a few good websites pertaining to this subject, as well as books. I’ll be sharing these with you in the future.

Hopefully after reading this article you have a better idea of bringing your idea that’s stuck in your head to reality. I look forward to bringing more material for my users to read and spark inspiration. In the next article I will be giving you a look at selecting a host for your website if you don’t already have one, and taking on the installation of Wordpress. -Zac Carter

Last week we began working on updating chase bay’s website to include e-commerce. In 2010 he is hoping to increase sales, and make the ordering process easier for his customers so he doesn’t spend as much time on the phone taking orders. Giving him more time to stay on task producing quality parts. Below are a few screen shots of the updates.

Click to enlarge:

Don’t forget we can install something similar for your business to increase profits substantially! Contact us.

We offer several different E-commerce models that are open source and have a large user community. By installing a catalog on your website you can increase sales and open the doors of your business to everyone on the Internet.

Decals for the users of FerrariLife.com and MaseratiLife.com are now available in the shop! They measure 4″x2.5″ and come in metallic red or metallic mist blue depending on which you order.

Inkwell Design Studios will be offering Driver Decals on our Catalog after the first of the year.

They may be customized with several different flags, as well as the name you want. Below is a photograph of what they will look like.

The decals measure 2″x14″ at the most, depending on how many characters are in your name. Pricing will be set at 16.00 per pair, plus shipping.

Here is part 2 in a series that will continue to evolve. I will continue with discussing the topics of creating websites, maintaining them and marketing them. Part 1 is available here. As of right now I am just going over key points of different topics to get your brain thinking. As time goes on I will put more structure in to each topic and continue to grow this series into something of substance. In this article I’m going to discuss what search engines like, and how to help your page rank.

>>SEO

S.E.O. or site engine optimization is a key ingredient to what makes up your page rank on the search engines. Wikipedia quotes the following – “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.” Most search engines have a algorithm that changes frequently, making it difficult to stay on top if you aren’t keeping up with there newest implementations.

>>Back Links

Back links, also known as incoming links, used to play a major role in how websites got to the top of a search query. That quickly changed as google observed webmasters using this as a blackhat technique to artificially push them to the top of the list. The number of back links can be one indication of how popular a website or blog might be. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.

>>Black Hat / White Hat

A term you need to familiarize yourself to as a new website owner. Even if you think you are a seasoned veteran, if you haven’t heard of this term it’s something you need to look up. Many people claim to be SEO professionals, but when looking for someone to optimize your website for search engines it’s a good idea to have some knowledge in the area, and what to be cautious about. Just about anyone can farm links, hide text, or stuff keywords. All of these are considered black hat. White hat techniques are create content that is accessible to the user rather than the search engines. White hat SEO is similar to web development that promotes accessibility. Using Black Hat techniques will harm your page rank. Producing good content will not only keep your readers/customers interested, it will also keep the robots happy.

Here at InkwellDesignStudios, we can help you with gaining knowledge on SEO, Backlinks, and more. We are a Creative Design Company located in Knoxville, TN. Contact us for more information, and don’t forget we’re on twitter too!