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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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Change of Status.com Website

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

I have finished redesigning another website called changeofstatus.com. The purpose of the site is to help simplify and minimize the confusion involved in an employee’s change of status (sometimes called a “life event”) as it pertains to their various healthcare benefit plans. When someone gets married or looses a dependent, usually things like this are considered life events and allow the employee to change their benefit package accordingly, so they are not paying for something they do not need. Also on the change of Status website there is a tool that converts the complicated employee change of benefits status matrix to an easy-to-use, three-step wizard, allowing employees, employers and administrators to determine what life events are permitted under IRS rules and regulations. I redesigned the site completely, you can see the site images above. The image on the right is the ‘before’ image, and the image on the left is the ‘after’. I used this template before on other company websites and I thought I do the same for this site to keep the branding consistent overall.

The site uses the jQuery Cycle Plugin for the banner rotater so that its visible even on devices like phones that don’t run Flash. Also, the website is completely SEO friendly. This is another case where I put my SEO checklist to work and it has helped tremendously. Previously the site was around 500 hits a month. Now even after a couple weeks, it has raised to over 1,500 hits a month. I’ll post the google analytics pictures as soon as I can.

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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Housemadehome.net Website

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

I have finished up another website for a client of mine (my wife), designed for her blog called housemadehome.net. The blog chronicles the renovations and decorating of our house, some recipes, and stories associated with the raising of our family. I worked really closely with her on the design of the site and I think it came out really well. I developed it using the WordPress backend, so she could easily make posts to it and handle the whole site by herself. We focused a lot on search engine optimization and the site has had a really good start so far… she has over 15 followers already. There are tons of home design blogs out there and they are getting bigger all the time. If you are looking for a custom made blog template, contact me so we can discuss the details of the project.

Cya

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