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.

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.

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.

There are sev­eral more plu­g­ins I find indis­pen­si­ble, but these three are the post edit pow­er­house I use to keep things tidy and user friendly. Two of them require API keys, but all are free, like most other Word­Press related plu­g­ins. Give them a shot. I can’t blog with­out them.

We started with a wood grain photo (from my old house) and faded it to a bright brown, then laid some graph­ics on it with a translu­cent con­tent pane. He is actu­ally a very good writer, and he also does a lot of legal work with ani­mals and ani­mal related orga­ni­za­tions. He’s actu­ally help­ing the state of PA write anti-abuse and anti puppy mill laws.

We took a few back­end items in this site and made them work together, so there is an under­ly­ing mem­ber­ship (con­ti­nu­ity) com­po­nent, as well as a pay­ment gate­way and newslet­ter func­tion. It has an auto-responder and a few other nifty gad­gets, all on a sim­ple, almost min­i­mal­ist sub­strate. The whole thing involved a great deal of edu­ca­tion so that the client could man­age the site himself.

I enjoy sites like this. They’re a-traditional, mildly grungy, not dark, but not light and use com­pletely non-standard col­ors. I have to hand it to the client on this one. She had a vision and made me real­ize it. I love work­ing with clients who know exactly what they want and wring it out of […]

I made heavy use of golds, oranges and yel­lows in this design, with reds as accent col­ors. Prob­a­bly the only non-offensive color in the whole mess is the blue text. It’s some­thing to behold. His cur­rent wife­said, “It’s pretty!” when she saw it. What­ever you say, sweety…