Connect with us

Articles

The Results of Project Icon

Published

on

The Results of Project Icon 9

The Results of Project Icon 10The community has voted, and the votes have been tallied. The winner of Project Icon, with 35% of the votes, is Entry ID “BD,” otherwise known as Ben Dunkle. Congratulations, Ben! The runner-up was VS, otherwise known as Verena Segert, so we’ll be attaching that set to the alternate color palette that is selectable from the profile screen. As we prepare for RC1, Ben and Verena will be revising a couple of their icons so that both sets will use the same metaphors, creating the colored “on” states, and creating the larger size of each icon for use in the h2 screen headers. We are very grateful to have had the opportunity to select from so many great options, and would like to express again our appreciation for all the designers who participated in the contest. Thanks also to the more than 3700 people who completed the voting survey and took the time to weigh on on the individual icon sets.

Q.18 Which one of the sets do you think we should use as a basis for the 2.7 icons?
Icon Set # of votes % of votes
BD 1285 35%
VS 1080 29%
GB2 424 11%
OSD 376 10%
LS 300 8%
GB1 235 6%

The wide lead of BD and VS made it clear that voters had a clear preference for these sets.

Q.20 If you could choose a runner-up, which would you choose?
Icon Set # of votes % of votes
VS 916 27%
BD 647 19%
LS 522 16%
OSD 488 14%
GB2 462 14%
GB1 331 10%

Question 20 was not mandatory, so a few hundred people skipped it, but the responses we did get (3366 of them) reinforced the fact that the two most popular sets were also the most popular 2nd choices, which made the decision of the judges to go with the popular vote an easy one (take that, electoral college!).

A few of the individual icon metaphors also had a significant lead over the other choices.
Dashboard: 1333 voters (40%) chose a house as the best metaphor. We agree, so both Ben and Verena will be replacing their Dashboard icons.

Media: 2097 voters (65%) chose the combination camera + musical note icon, which was part of Ben’s set. We also really loved it, and Verena will amend her media icon to incorporate this idea.

Plugins: 1682 voters (53%) selected the outlet plug metaphor, which both Ben and Verena used in their sets.

Tools: 1581 voters (49%) liked the combination of two tools better than anything else, so Ben and Verena will try this approach.

So those are the results, and soon you’ll see the new icons coming to a 2.7 installation near you.

Need another look at the entries to remember which one you liked best? Here are some reminder images, as well as the identity of each set’s creator.

Winning icon set by Ben DunkleBD was Ben Dunkle, a designer, professor and artist from upstate/western New York State. In case you’ve already forgotten, Ben’s icon set is the winner of Project Icon and will become the default icon set after a few minor changes. Verena Segert's blu iconsVS was Verena Segert, our runner-up, a designer from Germany who presented sets in both grayscale and blue. Her blue icons received more specific voter comments than the gray ones, so we’re planning the second color palette to be in shades of blue so that we can use the blue icon set.
Guillaume Berry's 1st setGuillaume Berry's 2nd setGB was Guillaume Berry, a designer from France who submitted two sets in the same style in order to propose a couple of different metaphors. One of his sets came in third while the other came in last, but whether you only look at the higher scoring set or you combine their votes, Guillaume had the next highest percentage of votes, and many people liked the metaphors he used for various icons. In fact, given the enthusiasm of the community for Guillaume’s icons, we think a great plugin would be one that would allow the user to upload the icon set of their choice. Any volunteers?
Menu icons by Open Source Design ClassOSD was the Open Source Design class at Parson’s in New york City, taught by Mushon Zer-Aviv and consisting of students Alexandra Zsigmond, Ed Nacional, Karen Messing, Khurram Bajwa, Leonie Leibenfrost. Teacher and students worked together to determine their metaphors and visual style. Luke Smith's menu iconsLS was Luke Smith, a designer from Iowa who specializes in icons among his other design pursuits.

If you need to hire an icon designer any time soon, we highly recommend our Project Icon contestants, who all delivered great work in a very short timeframe. It was great to work with all of them, even for such a short assignment.

So, to sum up:

  1. The winning icon sets by Ben Dunkle and Verena Segert will be incorporated into WordPress 2.7 RC1.
  2. Someone should write a plugin that would allow anyone to upload a custom icon set (I bet the other contestants could be convinced to release their icon sets for such a purpose).
  3. 2.7 is still trucking away, but we can always use help with patches, especially for IE6! (I know, that wasn’t in the main post, but it’s true, so hmph)

Thanks again to everyone who participated in this experiment, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And congratulations again to Ben and Verena!

Continue Reading
1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Pingback: WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 — WPCult

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Guest Post

10 Steps to Evaluating and Measuring Your Marketing Strategy

Published

on

10 Steps to Evaluating and Measuring Your Marketing Strategy 12

10 Steps to Evaluating and Measuring Your Marketing Strategy 13

When you are trying to market a product, the product or service is only as good as the potential clientele think it is. You need to get them to buy or use the item or service before you can tell if it really works for them. How can you go about evaluating and measuring your current marketing strategy?
Input vs. Output
Check your financial statements. Are you spending more money than you are making? In a strong marketing campaign, this should not be the case. You want to tweak your plan to make more money than you are putting into the project.
Customer Surveys
When you sell a product, include a survey along with it. Ask the customer to rate different qualities of the product that directly relate to the market. For example, ask them how they heard about the product and if the visual appeal of the item had anything to do with its purchase.
Phone Surveys
Distribute flyers, pamphlets and other coupon offers to people and see if they call back. You’ll know if the marketing works based upon how many people call. When they do call, ask what elements of the flyer or other item made them want to call you.
Test Group
Before you send a new item onto the market, have a test group to evaluate your marketing. For example, you might bring in a section of the company that has never seen the ad. Ask them what they think and if they would buy the product.
Introspective Analysis
What about you? Try to separate yourself from the ad as much as possible. Imagine that you were walking down the street and saw this advertisement. Would you feel inclined to purchase it or use the service? What elements of it are captivating and visually appealing? What elements turn you away?
Quantitative Data
Of course, all of these surveys and questions are important; however, you must generate quantitative data from all of them. For example, calculate the percentage of people who learned about your company from the Internet, paper flyers, word of mouth, and so forth. Put the information into charts.
Compare Years
After you have put the information into charts, you should start comparing this year’s findings to last year’s findings. If you find that a larger percentage of people are using the Internet than last year, you will have gained valuable insight into the company’s advertising.
Targeting the Many…
Once you find where most of your patrons are coming from, work to keep up steady advertisements in that domain. If most people are finding your company through Google searches, maintain fresh SEO strategies throughout the year to keep generating customers in that manner.
…And the Few
Let’s say that very few people are finding you from paper advertisements in the local department store. If this is a new trend, give it another shot to try to keep those few customers that you have. If it’s a continuing trend, you may want to put that money into another avenue.
Keep It Up
Don’t let your evaluation and measuring strategies fall to the wayside. You need to keep using them to ensure constant success for your company.
Evaluation and measurement strategies can bring both good and bad news to you about your marketing strategy. Be sure to use all of the information to generate more positive outcomes.

Thaddeus McGregor writes about business, marketing & finance at

www.businessinsurance.org.

Continue Reading

Tips & Tricks

Can′t add pagination on WooThemes Thick Theme

Published

on

Everything I have tried has led to nothing. And I have tried six way’s from Sunday to get my main posts to paginate.

example one:

<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; 
query_posts('offset=1&showposts=' . get_option('woo_other_entries') . '&cat=-' . $GLOBALS['ex_asides'] . '&paged=$paged' ); ?>

example two:

<?php 
global $myOffset; 
global $wp_query;
$myOffset = 1;
$paged = intval(get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$temp = $wp_query;
$wp_query= null;
$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query(array(
	'offset' => $myOffset,
	'category__not_in' => array($GLOBALS['ex_asides'],7,84),
	'paged' => $paged,
	'showposts' => get_option('woo_other_entries'),
	)); ?>

example three:

<?php 
global $myOffset;
$myOffset = 1;
$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query(array(
	'offset' => $myOffset,
	'category__not_in' => array($GLOBALS['ex_asides'],7,84),
	'paged' => $paged,
	'showposts' => get_option('woo_other_entries'),
	)); ?>

And after those tries, I just can’t get more pages beyond the option’s that I choose, and can only pull an archive via the browse more link.

Any suggestions or anything?

Continue Reading

Tips & Tricks

Pulling custom fields from outside the loop

Published

on

In the last post “Creating a custom widget” I showed you how to create a custom widget. Well in this post I will show you how I used my custom widget to display all post with a certain custom field from outside the WordPress loop.

In the last post I used this tag:

<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/includes/showcase.php'); ?>

Now I will show you what the file showcase.php has:

<ul>
<?php
global $wpdb;

$sql = "SELECT wposts.*
	FROM $wpdb->posts wposts, $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta
	WHERE wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id
	AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'gallery-url'
	AND wposts.post_status = 'publish'
	AND wposts.post_type = 'post'
	ORDER BY wposts.post_date DESC LIMIT 8";

$pageposts = $wpdb->get_results($sql, OBJECT);
$output = $pre_HTML;

foreach ($pageposts as $post) : setup_postdata($post);  ?>

<li><a href="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "gallery-url", $single = true); ?>" title="Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
<img src="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "image", $single = true); ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" /></a></li>

<?php endforeach; ?>

</ul>

That’s it! The most important item you may want to change for your own custom field is the line : AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'gallery-url'. Where you would change the text in bold to match your own custom field value.

Update:

Check out Austin from PressedWords comment below.

With his great advise I was able to figure out why all my attempts to use the query_post weren’t working. it came down to this line of code: <?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "gallery-url", $single = true); ?>, that was what I had in my code, and the $post->ID is the reason my code would not echo or print the custom field’s value. Solution? replace $post->ID with get_the_ID(). HA, so simple.

Continue Reading

Random Search Terms

Title

Recent Posts: Fully Net Worth . com

Cash Nasty Net Worth: How Much He Makes From YouTube?

Cash Nasty Net Worth: How Much He Makes From YouTube?

Cash Nasty is an American Youtuber who is known for running the Youtube channel called WhatChaMaCalling. Moreover, he is also on Twitch where he runs a channel called CashNastyGaming. As of 2019, Cash Nasty net worth is estimated to be $1.5 million. He was born on December 4, 1990  in Vidalia, Louisiana. Nasty has always been […]

DaBaby Net Worth: How Rich is the Rapper Actually?

DaBaby Net Worth: How Rich is the Rapper Actually?

Jonathan Lyndale Kirk, who is better known by his stage name as DaBaby, is an American rapper. He is best known for his hit debut album which was called Baby on Baby and even made it to the number 7 of the reputed Billboard Hot 100. As of 2019, DaBaby net worth is around $3 […]

Payton Moormeier Net Worth: How Rich is the Tik Tok Star Actually?

Payton Moormeier Net Worth: How Rich is the Tik Tok Star Actually?

Payton Moormeier is a social media personality who is best known for his lip-sync videos on the popular platform called TikTok where he has more 8.8 million followers where his videos have received close to 350 million likes which is an absolutely mammoth number, especially considering that he is still only 16 years old. As […]

Luh Kel Net Worth: How Rich is the Rapper Actually?

Luh Kel Net Worth: How Rich is the Rapper Actually?

Turran Coleman, who is better known as Luh Kel, is an American singer and songwriter. He is best known for his hit single called “Wrong” which managed to peak at number 37 in the Billboard Hot R&B / Hip-Hop Songs chart and was certified Gold by RIAA in 2019. As of 2019, Luh Kel net […]

Trending