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The Dreamy Spoon Website

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Yesterday, I finished developing another website called The Dreamy Spoon. The Dreamy Spoon is a Self Served Frozen Desserts Store located in Maumelle , Arkansas and it a full flash website that also has a wordpress blog with it. This has to be one the most fun websites I have done in a while, partly because of the silliness of the design (which was done by Cody Scott of  Kinetic Media Solutions ). Some of the special things about the website are they it uses SWFAddress to increase SEO and add the ability to go straight to a specific page, as well as a custom MP3 music player, and all the animations were pretty cool too. The website includes everything from a flavors page, a contact page, and links to the social media websites.

One of the hardest things to code for the website was getting the stage to resize correctly when the user resizes the browser window, because the grassy hills had to stay at the bottom and the cloud background had to scale correctly.

To increase SEO, I created the The Dreamy Spoon Blog (made from WordPress) that the owner could add news posts and I also duplicated the flash pages  into wordpress pages and basically hide them from the user (meaning no actual links to them), but when I submit a sitemap to Google Web Mastertools I will include those links so they get indexed.

This might be the best flash website I have done so far and it was a lot of fun to work on, let me know what you guys think.

Cya

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Coronado Cupcakery Website

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

A few weeks ago, I finished developing and designing another website called Coronado Cupcakery. The cupcakery, located in Coronado, California has a fun but clean feel to it and the owner, Rosalina, wanted to have a similar look and feel for their website. Rosalina was a great client and I loved designing and developing her site. Some of the things I love about the site are the clean lines, classic text, and lots of color (I kept the background white for a clean look, and so that the colors and pictures would pop off the page). The website includes everything from a flavors page, to an ordering form, to a gallery of some of their most impressive work…. all organized in a fashion that is user friendly and easy to navigate.

Another part of the site I like a lot is the navigation. To create it, I used nettuts How to Build a Lava-Lamp Style Navigation Menu but I edited the files some so that the hover effect didn’t cover the entire menu item, but instead just kept an thick underline underneath the menu item. I really like the effect and I think I might recreate it as a flash menu.

Cya

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Richard Godwin Website

Thursday, October 14th, 2010
Richard Godwin Website Richard Godwin Blog - Welcome to the Slaughterhouse

I have finished working on another freelance website for a client, its called richardgodwin.net, and as you probably guessed it was for a person named Richard Godwin.  Richard is a really talented writer of dark crime fiction and noir,  and is about to publish his book, called ‘Apostle Rising.’  He had two blogs already that he consistently updated, so it was an obvious choice to build his site off of the WordPress Framework. Another reason I built the site using the WordPress framework is because of the awesome admin section it has. It really does do a great job in allowing the client to change the content on the website whenever they want, especially when they don’t have any coding knowledge.

As I worked on the site, Richard hired a graphic designer named Matthew Swann to finalize some graphics for the site. I usually do the graphics as well for the sites I work on, but it was a nice change of pace to have some help and it was really great working with Matthew.

There are a few special things I did for this site, that I want to list off here. There was a great plugin called WordPress.com Stats from their old site, that I implemented into their new site that lets them view their hits and pageviews from the WordPress dashboard. There were some problems initially with it but I fixed it by going into phpMyAdmin and messing with some fields in the SQL database.  For the navigation of the website and blog, they really liked the CSS Horizontal Menus I found on http://www.cssmenumaker.com. So I implemented one of those into the theme, and changed the color around to go with the rest of the site a little better. Another cool item on the site is the Steel Melting Flash Text Effect in the banner. I bought the file from activeden and added it to the site on two different pages. I think it looks really great and it achieved the flashy effect that Richard was wanting for announcing his upcoming book.

The last thing I want to talk about is the new default theme for WordPress called Twenty Ten. I created his blog theme from the Twenty Ten Theme and I just wanted to say that it was really easy to work with and modify, and that it comes with a ton more admin options in the dashboard area that the old default theme was really missing. My hat goes off to the WordPress team as they constantly raise the bar of their product again and again.

Cya

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Featured Author of the Week on ActiveDen

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Since joining ActiveDen, where you can buy and sell royalty-free Adobe Flash and Flex files, I have wanted to make the featured author of the week. I am proud to announce that I have finally achieved this goal of mine.  I am really honored and humbled to be chosen and want to thank Envato (The Company that owns  the marketplace) for selecting me, especially LanceSnider, the ActiveDen Site Manager. If you have ever thought about selling graphics, or wordpress themes, or anything of that nature then the Envato Marketplaces are the way to go.  These sites have the best community of authors and buyers.

Its really been amazing creating files and seeing people use them on their own sites, and  there is something really rewarding in it thats hard to articulate with words. Thanks again ActiveDen for the opportunity you give us and for the feature.

Cya

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WordPress and Flash 10x Cookbook Review

Friday, June 25th, 2010

As you may know, I have completed quite a few projects and written several posts regarding the integration of Flash and WordPress. In fact, my latest project was a complete Flash and WordPress Website called RocFolio 2.

A few weeks ago I was excited to be contacted by Packt Publishing. They asked me to review one of their books, “WordPress and Flash 10x Cookbook”. I was honored that they contacted me and excited for the opportunity to read through their book and see what I could learn. Here is the book information followed by my review.

Book Information

Full Title: WordPress and Flash 10x Cookbook
Author(s): Peter Spannagle, Sarah Soward
Pages: 268
Published: April 2010
Publisher: Packt Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-847198-82-2

My Review

The book as a whole is written well and includes over 50 simple and effective techniques on how to control certain tasks relating to Flash content in WordPress. The easy-to-follow step by step instructions, and pictures to help out those of us who are more visual, that accompany the techniques make integrating Flash and WordPress a fairly straightforward process.

This book is aimed at new or intermediate WordPress users who are interested in learning how to create the unique and media-rich sites that using plug-ins and Flash can provide, so much of the book’s content I was already fairly familiar with.  But for the newer user looking to enhance their personal or business sites and blogs, this book definitely contains strategies and techniques to help you do just that. Just remember that a working knowledge of XHTML, CSS, and graphic design is helpful and familiarity with WordPress is required, because the book does not address the basic mechanics of using WordPress itself. Also, any previous experience with Flash is helpful but not necessary.

Honestly, the Cookbook focused more on how to add, edit, and embed Flash into WordPress than an actual integration of the two, which is what I had originally thought it was going to be about. It also mentions several really nice WordPress plug-ins, some of which were strictly for helping you add and control Flash on your WordPress site, while others mentioned are to help you with SEO, Google Sitemaps, and optimizing your WordPress site as a whole. The Cookbook also delves into some Actionscript 3.0 scripting which is followed by examples paired with actual code. Here are links to some of the plug-ins the book mentions that I found to be particularly helpful tools in building a WordPress site:

Kimili Flash Embed Plugin
Dean’s FKCEditor  Plugin
Google Sitemaps XML Plugin
SEO Title Tags Plugin
FLV Embed Plugin

If you don’t know how to use these plug-ins, or have an overall desire to learn more about Flash content within WordPress, the WordPress and Flash 10x Cookbook definitely explains in detail the best way to do so. Overall, this book is a great reference and would be a helpful addition to your desk or workspace, especially if you’re a new or intermediate designer/developer. Hey, even if you’re an advanced user it could still come in handy, teaching you something you might have missed along the way as you taught yourself… we all have something to learn. Right?

Cya

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