Twitter recently updated its format to feature translucent section backgrounds making an engaging background more important. For two of my sites with related Twitter accounts, I prepared these background images shown as they appear on Twitter.

The U.S. Scouting Service Project launched a program designed to help Scouts be prepared to use the Internet safely, to be aware of dangers, and alert to risks. This Internet Scout Patch program can be found at http://usscouts.org/InternetScoutPatch.asp. Aside from serving as the primary author and editor of the materials for this program, I was also the graphics artist for supporting patch designs, the publication cover image, and an advertising image. The last image below shows the actual patches offered for the program which are fairly true to the design developed in Photoshop.

For years I have been operating a site dedicated to International Scouting at WorldScouting.com. Over time the site fell into disuse and was not being updated. It was time for an overhaul and for fresh content. I moved the site to WorldScouting.net and migrated from static content to dynamic content using WordPress. The resulting design is far superior and also shares the same theme as related sites.

A friend was looking for a new design for his Scouting blog. This is the prototype design that we developed following the same theme as used in related sites.

The NetCommish.com site was in use from 1994 to 2011. However, the original site was pretty much limited to static content, so it was time to find a more robust solution while not interrupting web traffic to resources offered by the site. The solution was to start a sister site with a new name and build a new site and gradually migrate content and traffic to the new domain.

The design mock-up for the updated site previously shown in an earlier post was dropped in favor of a design compatible with WordPress that would take full advantage of social media and allow greater flexibility. In addition the site was broken into three sub-sites with separate blogs and content pages.

The primary site, http://netcommissioner.com is depicted below.

A separate sub-site with a similar theme was developed for a guest writer’s advice columns. This site utilizes a separate WordPress database, but has common navigation and design elements. It is at http://netcommissioner.com/askandy/.

A third site was developed for online training using a similar theme and a third instance of WordPress. It is located at http://netcommissioner.com/training/.

To assure the best user experience, content pages on the old NetCommish site were converted to redirect pages as the content becomes available on the new site. This assures that traffic from bookmarks, links on other sites, and links in search results drive traffic to the new site. This was a successful approach. The new site now has twice the traffic as the older site because it has traffic from old links and the pull of social media to bring new traffic.

The original NetCommish web site looked like this in the late 1990′s.