Felicia Day

Feast your eyes all: This is the new feliciaday.com. Sleek, sophisticated, flirty, and stylishly accessible. If only I could be so cool in person. Can you tell I’m gleeful?!?!

For many years I’ve lived a life of website envy; bookmarking sites I loved, trying to tweak premium WordPress themes in imitation (mostly ending up with god-awful backgrounds and NOT well-designed eye-splitting colors, LOL). With the 2009 New Year I resolved to blog more, but realized my website was one of my big limitations in motivation: It didn’t encourage interactivity, and basic information wasn’t accessible to the casual browser. A few weeks ago I Twittered my frustration about getting a better website and got a lot of wonderful responses that happened to include an offer of skills from a wonderful designer Dane Hesseldahl. I clicked on his site and totally fell in love with his work: Simple, clean, stylish. Yes, please!

After we started corresponding, Dane came up with several brilliant designs for the site, all of which blew me away. We settled on a design I believe he referred to as “Southern girl takes LA/modern but old-fashioned feel” that was based a lot on my love of Typography. I’m not sure how he did it, but it was love at first website sight!

Please browse around, every part of the site is brand spanking new. You’ll notice that the site is laid out quite simply, yet is packed with information. There are too many details to point out without causing you to glaze over, but I’d love to draw attention to a few items that I think are notable/unique:

-I’m still working on a WordPress platform. I can change anything about the site within the WordPress dashboard with no technical knowledge whatsoever.

-The site serves as a central hub to all my online social networking sites, but also integrates those sites back to here seamlessly through widgets and other featured areas. It’s a two-way street of information. Some assets, like my headshots on Flickr, were left elsewhere rather adding another website page. Why duplicate and clutter up the site?

-I already mentioned my love of Typography, so the site uses a bold header font everywhere. I believe it has something to do with Flash, but I’ll concede ignorance and just say it looks pretty. And what a difference a logo makes! Lovely!

-The main limitation in WordPress sites is the static sidebar. Dane included something pretty unique which I now feel should be required of EVERY WordPress blog: A dropdown menu to choose different widgets for each website page. Each page on the site has different widgets and I can add/subtract at a click of a button. It makes it feel much more layered and deep and makes the WordPress blog engine a true CMS. So wonderful!

-To keep the look unified, Dane tweaked and customized several of the sidebar widgets; for instance, the Last.fm one on the About page. Also with the ability to change the sidebar on each page we added some interesting widgets, like an RSS to a Google Alert on “Felicia Day” in the Press page, and The Guild playlist RSS on MSN on the Videos page.

I’d love to hear what you think and am so excited to have the site up and running! It will be so hard to keep from blogging now…I know it! Thank you Dane (@dane_hesseldahl on Twitter), I dub thee: “WordPress Wizard.”

If you haven’t noticed, my latest obsession is redoing the blog, and pretty much all things WordPress related. I’ve compiled a list of sites that I’ve found really valuable in my hunt for a new skin, and other resources to help me (attempt to) tweak them. Hope they come in handy to some of you bloggers!

WordPress Theme Links

• Smashing Magazine has comprehensive lists of anything design related. Three great lists of Free Skins can be found here, here and here. A wonderful starting point.
• Fresheezy is another site with a Gallery of free WordPress skins. Definitely worth a look.
• WPZoom has very good articles and compilations of WordPress resources, free skins and otherwise.
• Uberblogger Skelliwag complied a list of six minimalist free skins. Handy if you’re into white space.
• Desperate Curiosity lists 100 favorite skins. A little older resource but still some nice designs.
• A list of skins at a Japanese(?) site called Designwalker rounds out my theme resources.

WordPress Plugin Resources

• Mashable has a list of 30+ Plugins to get more blog readers, and 50 Great Widgets. Both great lists to add content to your sidebars and enhance your site.
• Quick Online Tips has a list of the 50 Best Powerblogging Widgets.

General Design Lists

• 99 Sites Designers Must Know About. Great list of resources for design elements/inspiration.
• 100+ Web 2.0 Generators. Exhaustive list of everything from favicon generators to rounded corner graphics.
• ForWebDesigners lists fonts, css, free photo resources, all on an attractive page, smartly sorted.

Useful Sites for Designing Your Site

• Dafont is my first stop for fonts.
• Colour Lovers is a great resource for background patterns and user-submitted color palettes.
• Or create your own color palette at Color Blender.

After you find a theme and install your WordPress, use this helpful list “The Complete WordPress Post-Install Checklist” to walk you through your first steps. Then start blogging! Or check out adii’s list of his Top 53 Blog Design of 2007 and be envious.

Got back from a lovely weekend away, hope all of you had an equally relaxing and enjoyable few days! I had two massages and both times the people were like, “Wow, you have a lot of knots in your back!” Nice to know I was certifiably stressed. It was great to be away from the computer, I made it a “no screen” weekend, didn’t bring a computer or cell phone or camera. As long as it seemed like I was away, I didn’t miss much of all. Just goes to show how efficient my time online REALLY is

I got a bug up my butt to redo this site, I’ve been focused on it like a laser the past few weeks actually, but in my time away I realize that in order to do what I need to ACTUALLY do (ie getting a second season of The Guild plotted out, and getting another spec script written) I need to cut out extra things in my life, for the short term at least. Realistically, I realize I have no time to really learn how to WordPress properly to do what I would like to do in my head, and no money to pay a fancy designer to do a custom site right now.

SO, I decided to use this one as an interim site until I find a nice Premium site to buy for cheap that I can tweak on my meager WordPress knowledge. I’m pretty happy with the bones of this skin, there are a lot of bugs I’m working out and I appreciate your patience if things look wonky for a bit. The only real drawback of it is the narrow blog column, but I think I can live with it for now. Let me know what you think!

This week I have a HUGE stack of books to review, I’m looking forward to getting the Flog back on track!

Strangely enough, I clicked on a Dr. Horrible link in my daily “Felicia Day” Google Alert email (YES, I Google Alert myself, it’s not narcissism, it’s BUSINESS ) and lo and behold the official fan site for Dr. Horrible is up and running here!   Wow, when Joss said this would be a “little internet project” I guess maybe I took him at face value a little too much, haha.  Pretty exciting to see him already turning the internet upside down, and people so interested,  so early on!

Looking at this site made me think:  Goddamned I need a new website!  They put that great place together in like, a week!  I mean in comparison this place is pretty ghettolicious.  I need to flip my blog over to my main directory and have the whole site be a WordPress platform.  I have some skins I’ve looked at adopting, but nothing makes me happy.  I guess is the narcissism and modesty fighting tooth and nail in my head.  I don’t want my cheesy face slap-dab in the center of people’s screens when they log onto my site, but when I play with a skin WITHOUT that, I’m like “Well, am I an actress or not?!  Show your mug woman!”  And…and I have no time for anything so…oh well.  Summer project   If anyone finds a skin I could easily adapt like this layout, let me know.   That site is brilliantly laid out!

Total separate issue, I was hunting around and found a “behind the scenes” little video from a project I did in the past, it will remain nameless.  Someone was just filming the set and happened to pick up a conversation.   I wasn’t in the video, but it showed some of the actors hanging out waiting to shoot, and saying some stuff that they wouldn’t necessarily want thrown on the internet, at least I wouldn’t if it was me.  I was pretty disturbed by that.  I mean, when you’re hanging out waiting to work, you don’t think that a private conversation would be broadcast to the world, but when people are interested in what you’re doing, especially actors, it seems like it’s fair game to do whatever with their privacy.    I don’t have the cleanest mouth, I like to say “balls” a lot, but if a video of me cussing like a sailor got out there, which I’m sure there’s one out there from improv at least, it could hurt the way some people think about me.  I dunno, it just seemed pretty lame to throw this unnamed clip on the internet without permission.   And made me think…I need to look out for cameras when I’m cussing.  HAHA.