Jason Pearce

I recently had a chance to do some logo design work; something I haven’t done in a while.

Ann Cameron Pearce

Mom and I recently launched a new website (which I’ll talk about next) to sell flute music from her and other artist. She wanted a logo to help brand her work.

Playing with her initials and several fonts, I noticed that the Rockwell font made her lowercase initials look a little like a face. The “a” was an ear, the “c” was an eye, and the “p” was a nose and eye. I know, I have a vivid imagination.

My idea was to place a flute underneath her initials, which would make it look like initials were playing the flute. After bouncing several ideas around with my cousin and graphic artist Chad Cameron, we came up with this.

ScoreVivo

The new company and website we created is called ScoreVivo. It’s a new sheet music publishing company that currently sells downloadable compositions and arrangements by Ann Cameron Pearce, Al Hager, and Trevor Wye.

For this logo, I wanted to illustrate that the site is about music. Using the Lassus font, I established a basic score. I then placed the text ScoreVivo on top of the score. The design change that ties the two together occurred when I replaced the dot in the “i” with a whole note. My only concern is that it’s too subtle for most people to notice. I just hope musicians might be more attuned (pun intended).

I often feel sleazy talking about search engine optimization — likely because I’m frequently contacted by SEO scammers who think they can improve jasonpearce.com’s rankings in search engines when it was already the top result for the searches that interest me.

Well, jasonpearce.com has fallen off of Google’s front page for the search “Jason Pearce” and is no longer the first result via Yahoo.com or Bing.com. What gives?

September to October decline

I made two major changes to my website in September 2010.

• I published a new design
• I began using CloudFlare.com for DNS and as a content distribution network

Foolishly, I made both changes at the same time, so I’m unable to determine which change had the greatest detrimental impact on my website’s SEO rankings.

Since it’s far easier to stop using CloudFlare’s CDN services than to revert back to my old design/theme, I’m going to try this first. Otherwise, I’ll need to readdress my new design and front page.

Oh, and if you are a sleazy SEO company, be forewarned; I don’t want to hear from you in my comments, via my contact me page, or by email.

I finally got around to redesigning my personal blog/website at www.jasonpearce.com. My previous design was a modified version of the default WordPress template. I used this design for almost 10 years.

My new design is a modification of the free Seven Five WordPress Theme from www.press75.com. I liked its cleaner and simpler look. More so, I felt it did a better job of organizing the content and activity I contribute on other websites.

When I created my blog 10 years ago, there were fewer tools that made it easy and convenient to post content online. Now there are social networks, photo repositories, and interactive destinations. I wanted to provide greater exposure to this third-party destinations while maintaining my blog as the central focus. The Seven Five theme helped me accomplish all of this.

I hope you like the new design.

This is how Wonderware Central‘s new website looks on an iPhone. Not too bad for a mobile device. Admittedly, the iPhone Safari browser renders many sites rather well.

After several months of work, I’m pleased to say that Wonderware Central launched its redesigned website today.

Many people were involved in this project, but I did most of the development and design.

This was my first time using the open source Joomla content management system. As such, it was also my first time developing a Joomla template. It didn’t take me too long to figure out and understand how Joomla and its templates work.

I based my design on the Yahoo YUI CSS framework. Joomla uses Mootools as the JavaScript framework, so I stuck with that. I also made use of several third-party extensions that have been developed for the Joomla CMS, which speed up my development and should make it easier to maintain the website in the long run.

This was a fun project to work on. So far, I’m receiving some good feedback from my coworkers, which is nice.