I would like to present to you Design Crash Magazine.

So, what is Design Crash Magazine?

Design Crash Magazine is a blog formed by me and graphic designer Mitch Myers with the contribution of a group of talented professionals. Design Crash Magazine’s main objective is to bring to you as many resources as possible; resourcers such as feeds that will help the web designer, graphic designer and artist in general to get inspired with the  compilation of latest trends.

So, make sure to check out the blog and drop us a line anytime!

We have talked in a previous article about how easy it is to have an online presence now days. The key is not in creating an online presence but also learning to develop and maintain this online identity clean, friendly and professional.

This is the second part of my previous post called How to Create, Develop and Maintain a Successful Online Identity.

Build and Maintain a Good Online Reputation

Regardless of what the purpose of your profile/website/ blog is, it’s important to keep a clean online reputation  - even if you are not planning on doing business online.

Have you tried “googling” yourself? Try it and see what comes up. What you will see is what’s your online identity today.

Brand Yourself with Gravatar

There are some really good tools you can use if you are trying to create a successful online identity. One of them is Gravatar.  To quote from the website “A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things…”

Benefits of using Gravatar

Avatars allow people to recognize you  easier whenever you comment or post something on websites, blogs and web forums. (more…)

Ahhhh… Spring.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really happy Spring is here.  I know we’ve had spring for about a month already, but it just didn’t feel like Spring to me until this past week. We’ve had a tough winter but it’s all gone - at least it seems.

So I figured, brand new Spring calls for a brand new design for the blog. This time I wanted to make something quite different from all the designs I’ve had in the past for this blog. I think you will notice that the main change was the background which is black when in the past I’ve tried to keep the background of a light color, preferably white.

Old Times ..Good Times

First, let’s reminisce a little in the various designs Karina Myers’ Blog has had. At the beginning, I decided to have a very playful approach using different colors and the result was…

I though it was cute and I like that I had my sponsors link in the top of the page. But, a designer’s mind never stops working so guess what…I came up with a second design.

For my second layout I wanted to include my twitter account, so I added a status post in the header which ended up looking like this:

I love swirly brushes, and I was pretty happy I was able to implement it in this design.

For the design that came after that I wanted to make a pretty innovative design with some fire or neon glow somewhere in it. Here is an image of what the header layout ended up being:

Red is one of my favorite colors and I still love that KM logo I made…good times!

The new and improved layout for Karina Myers’ Blog… that’s me

For this new design I decided to give it a rest to my digital web character. I hold the design very close to my heart and I’ll probably implement it in my future design… who knows? what do you think?

Let’s start with the logo. I must say, I’m really happy with the results. This new logo has a fresh look to it and I like that I was able to implement the various colors that I like in it without making it look bad, and guess what.. I’m using neon colors which look beautiful with the black background!

I’m also using different dark tones and thin light borders that you will probably need to take a close look to the design in order to notice it.

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Lately, I’ve been working in some small details in my blog - as some of you might have noticed.  This time, I just wanted to post a quick tutorial about how to customize your comments in your Wordpress blog.

How to Change the Style of the Author’s Comment in Wordpress

You probably have seen this before, whenever you are reading the comments of a post and you notice that the author’s comment is highlighted in a particular way, just so it’s different than the rest. Well, there are many ways to get this done.

An easy way to do it is by going to Appearances -> Edit -> style.css and add the following class:

.author_comment {
background-color: #F1C056 !important;
}

This simple class will just change the background of the author’s comment box. Here you can customize the style of your author’s box by changing the border color, etc.

Finally,  you need to make a small change in comments.php,  so go to Appearances  -> Edit -> comments.php. Once you are in the page, look up the line

<li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment...

Change it to this:

<li class="<?php
/* Only use the author_comment class from style.css if the user_id is 1 (admin) */
if (1 == $comment->user_id)
$oddcomment = "author_comment";
echo $oddcomment;
?>" id="comment…

That’s all, if you followed this two simple steps correctly, your author’s box should be displaying with an improved and personalized style.

How to Change the Avatars Sizes in Comments

This is really easy, the kubrick wordpress template resizes the images to 32×32 by default. In order tyo change the sizes, go to Appearances  -> Edit -> comments.php and look up

<?php echo get_avatar( $comment,

You will find a line that looks like

<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 ); ?>

In order to make the image bigger just try changin the number 32 to 50.  That’s all.

I hope you enjoyed this small tutorial.  Until next time!

If are you proficient with Php, HTML, and CSS the possibilities of what you can achieve with WordPress are unlimited. Even if you aren’t a coding or web development guru, there are still many simple things that you can do to improve your WordPress site. There are a countless number of plugins that do just about everything, but there are many times where all you need to do is copy and paste a simple line of code to tweak your site. Here are five of my favorite simple WordPress tricks to change the look, feel and function of your WordPress template.

Read More

In order to improve your website you got to know first how is your website doing, how many visitor do you get in a week? and where are they visiting your website from? Two of the best free services out there are Google Analytics and GetClicky…

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Recently I’ve been trying to improve the performance of my blog using some tools that allow me follow up on my statistics in a better way. These are some websites that have come handy for me, hope you enjoy the collection.

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Before this blog, I used to have a blog under blogsome service, so I created this post that I think is worth to re-post it here. Even though I’m not active in my old blogsome blog I think it will be useful for many people who still have blogsome.

This article is to share with those who haven’t mastered in blogsome just yet and are trying to do some changes in their template. If you have any questions I might have the answer but I strongly recommend to ask the experts at Blogsome Forum if you have a question about your blogsome blog.

Here are some condensed info of the things that I’ve needed and learned to add to my blog.

1. Add “Read More…” at the end of my article:
   Do not mistake it with the option excerpt, I’ll be explaining this shortly. To do this teaser which refers to sentences or paragraphs of a post, you just need to insert the Quicktag after a few sentences to act as a cut off point.
   (more…)