Stacy Duval

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October 25, 2014 by Stacy Duval Leave a Comment

SF WordCamp 2014 – Design with Personas

The first workshop I attended was with Davide Casali, called Design with Personas, a Lean Approach. This was a high level UX/UI design topic and I felt as if I was in a university graphic design class.

Davide began by explaining the tendency for there to be a disconnect between user and designer. The machinery separates us from our users and creates a shadow hiding the users. This happens naturally because we are focused too much on the product itself.

The second disconnect is called “Elastic Users”. The typical user of a site becomes diluted or can be quite different from the actual user because each designer has a different view of who the user is. The more people on the design team, the more ideas get added to who the user is.

Personas are profiles of typical users of your website. They were invented by Alan Cooper who wrote the book “About Face”. They are a profiles of typical users, how they behave, how they think and how they communicate, and most importantly, why. A persona is like fictional character development in fiction, when you are finished you should be able to predict exactly how that user would think, speak or do something because the description is so complete.

Once the personas are fleshed-out then the software can be built based on behavior. Building a persona should not be considered a deliverable, but data synthesis. The first step is your discovery process, your initial research and then the personas are developed. Once the personas are done then development can begin. The persona is synonymous with the data.

Personas can be used in different ways. They can be used to design, to reference data, to prioritize and plan and to do ticket triage. For instance, if you know 65% of your users are this type of persona you can place those people in the beginning of your support queue.

To complicate is easy, to simply is hard. ~ Bruno Minardi

Filed Under: Web Design

August 5, 2014 by Stacy Duval Leave a Comment

How to Send Mail from Apple Mail from Multiple Addresses

If you have multiple email addresses, perhaps one for work and one for home, and you want to set up Apple Mail so you can send emails from more than one address read on.

In the Apple Mail application select “Preferences” from under the “Mail” dropdown menu at the top of the screen.

Then select the “Accounts” icon in the choices across the top of the Preferences pane.

apple mail preference accounts pane

In the “Email Address” box list your emails one after another separated by commas like this: stacyduval@gmail.com, wpguru@stacyduval.com, hotmama@hotmail.com.

The first one will show up first so type in your most frequently used email first.

Then close the window by clicking the red dot in the upper left hand corner. The application will ask you if you want to save your changes and say “Yes”.

Now you will have this dropdown menu in the header of your emails.

apple-mail-multiple-addresses

Now when you send or reply to an email you will have to be careful to choose the correct address.

Filed Under: Web Design

June 29, 2014 by Stacy Duval Leave a Comment

How to Change the Favicon on a Genesis Child Theme

Step One:

Create a favicon 16 pixels by 16 pixels in Adobe Photoshop. Choose “Save As” to save the file. Choose the format “ICO (WINDOWS Icon) in the format chooser. Name the file favicon.ico.

Step Two:

FTP the newly created favicon.ico to the image folder in your Genesis child theme. Do a hard refresh of your screen and you should see your new icon.

To set up Photoshop to save file in the .ico format you need to install a plugin. You can find the plug at the Telegraphics Website. Download the correct version for your version of Photoshop and then unzip the file. Place the plugin file into the Plugins folder in your Adobe Photoshop folder.

If you do not have Photoshop you can use other image editors to create your favicon in a .png format. There are online .ico converters, to convert your .png to a .ico.

Filed Under: Web Design Tagged With: favicon, Genesis

June 29, 2014 by Stacy Duval Leave a Comment

How to change the site credits in the footer of a Genesis child theme

This is the code you need to put into your child theme functions.php file to change the default site credits in the footer of a Genesis child theme:

The first two snippets can be used to change the site credits.
The third snippet removes the entire footer and creates a simple footer.
The fourth snippet repositions the footer.
The fifth snippet adds a back to top toggle in the footer.

Filed Under: Web Design Tagged With: footer, footer credits, Genesis, site credits

April 30, 2014 by Stacy Duval Leave a Comment

How to Setup BackWPup Part Two

Now we are going to set up a Combo backup which is both a backup of your site files and the database. This backup you would use if you needed to restore the entire site. Chose “Add new Job” and name the job “Combo.” Choose the check boxes “Database backup”, “File backup” and “Installed plugins list.”

backwpup-10

Change the default generated string of letters and numbers after “backwpup_” to “combo.” See the example below: Also I choose Tar GZip and Backup to Folder.

 

The log file will give you a print out of the backup. This is very useful if their is a problem and that is why I choose only to look at the log file if their is a problem. Although if you need reassurance that your files are being backed up you can uncheck this option and receive the log file at each backup. Save your changes and go to the next tab.

backwpup-4

Choose the backup to start “with WordPress cron.” WordPress cron will facilitate your backup happening at the same time every week.

backwpup-5

I choose the backups to occur every day when I am developing a website and then change it to weekly when the site goes into production. Save changes before going to the next tab.

backwpup-6

I don’t change any of the defaults on this tab.

 

backwpup-7

 

 

Filed Under: Web Design Tagged With: backup, backwpup, tutorial, wordpress

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707-849-2702

Recent Posts

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