I’m not bit­ter, but I do hope the “let me make a pur­chase and I’ll let you know if I need any­thing else” idea catches on. There aren’t enough hours in the day to keep click­ing no to other spe­cial offers.

This is another polit­i­cal site that was done using Word­Press. Gary man­ages the cam­paign of the last polit­i­cal site I did. The back­ground employs very wide (1400 px) jpgs that have a fab­ric tex­ture, and a lit­tle CSS3 for those of you that use a real browser like Fire­fox 3.5 or Safari (in case you […]

This site is yet another Word­Press imple­men­ta­tion mak­ing heavy use of tem­plate files and cus­tom scripts per page. Word­Press seems ide­ally suited for polit­i­cal cam­paigns and polit­i­cal web­sites for it’s sim­plic­ity and ease of main­te­nance. The idea with this site was to make it look pro­fes­sional and make use of social tech­nolo­gies which politi­cians are start­ing to real­ize are nec­es­sary and smart.

I recently had a con­ver­sa­tion with a future client who fell vic­tim to this all-to-common issue. She went with a guy who talked the talk, but when chal­lenged played the non-disclosure card. He kept telling her that he couldn’t show her exam­ples of artis­tic work and SEO results because of com­pe­ti­tion issues. This is absolute hooey, but sounds good when you’re on the receiv­ing end. She has recently decided that the bar­gain route was too expensive.

It’s a glassy but­ton using a font that is made to resem­ble an eye. If you can think of a pur­pose for it, let me know.

Opti­miz­ing your web­site for search engines sounds like a good idea, as most peo­ple still find what they’re look­ing for using a search engine. SEO is as much an art as it is a sci­ence, and the experts are usu­ally not that far above the folks who do com­mon sense things as far as results. This makes it con­fus­ing, and more than a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing to new folks in the web realm. Let’s talk about how to make sense of it, shall we?

As per the way busi­ness has gone lately, it’s a Word­Press blog theme. I love work­ing with Word­Press, and so do my clients. They get up and run­ning fast with an ele­gant look­ing design, and they can put what­ever they want on it with a very shal­low learn­ing curve. If you are pay­ing some­one for updates, you owe it to your­self to look into WordPress.

I’ve devel­oped a lot of web­sites over the years, for a lot of peo­ple. I’ve devel­oped them for peo­ple who were seri­ous about mak­ing them work, and I’ve done them for peo­ple who were just dip­ping their toe in the Inter­net pool. What I’ve learned is, peo­ple with no goals when it comes to the on-line expe­ri­ence won’t last long. I’ve done some spec­tac­u­lar work for peo­ple who lost inter­est after the fact, not because I wasn’t there to help them along the way, but because they didn’t know what they were doing there in the first place.

The 960 grid sys­tem works well for most appli­ca­tions. Do I use it exclu­sively? No. Some do, but there are rea­sons not to. Mostly they revolve around tar­get audi­ence, but for most appli­ca­tions, the 960 grid works for web design. This will likely be the case until 1024 pixel wide screens go away and are replaced by 1280 (or some­thing else). Talk to me about what would be right for your site.

For some rea­son my clients always have weird require­ments for pages. Thank­fully, Word­press has a way. I remem­ber read­ing a post on a forum recently where a user asked the ques­tion, “I cre­ated a Page and on that Page I want to list all posts in a spec­i­fied cat­e­gory. How do I do this?” Nat­u­rally, one user decided to tell the guy it was impos­si­ble and that he should just stick to the sta­tus quo. This post is more for that doo­fus than it is for the guy who asked.