I'm a Web Designer / Developer!

I love love love wordpress. I love it so much this newest revision of this site was built using wordpress as a CMS (Content Management System).  In the past, all of my previous websites have been static html, but this time around I wanted something with a CMS behind it.

Being a web developer, I have played around with most of the big CMSs out there ie: Joomla, Drupal, Dotnetnuke.  All of them seemed a bit too much work for the worth. I even had thought of possibly building a system of my own, but it would have taken up way too much of my time and I didn’t want to deal with the headaches of starting something from scratch. So, in the end my final decision was to use wordpress.

I sat down, loaded up my favorite website I use for inspiration, which happens to be Design Shack and started work designing my new site.  Once I finalized how I wanted it to look, it was time for me to build my theme. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress here is an excerpt from the Wordpress website that talks about the theme system:

WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.

Putting together a theme isn’t really all them much different that building a normal html web page. Most of it is standard html, but you do need to know a little PHP to finish the job. Wordpress has some great info in their codex for getting started with building themes if you would like to build your own.

Once my theme was put together and installed in my wordpress installation it was now time for me to decide how to build my portfolio section. After many hours of searching though the plugins, that are available for wordpress, I stumbled across podsCMS. The pods cms system really opened my mind to the endless possibilities I now had in my hands with wordpress. If you look on the “Work” page of my site, pods was used to build that system. Now, once I have completed a new project all I have to do is login to the wordpress admin and simply upload some images, fill out the form I built and my new project is up on my website.

Since this new revision of my website was build, I have had the opportunity to build several other sites using wordpress as a CMS and have no problems. I would highly recommend wordpress to anyone who is looking for a blog system or a CMS.

As the ever increasing popularity of the mobile market continues, Flash is quickly becoming more and more obsolete.  With none of the major smart phones, whether it be iPhone or Android, and with the impending release of the iPad supporting it, I find myself wondering what will happen to all of the websites out there with some form a Flashon them.

Throughout my career as a web developer, I have never really been a fan of Flash .  Integrating Flash into a project was always more of a hassle than it was worth. Although the web designer side of me has always loved a few sites that were built entirely in Flash, it still seems to be more of a novelty.  I’ll admit that I have used Flash here and there on various sites that I have built. It usually renders itself useful for an easy picture gallery or a rotating banner. However, I find myself wondering why didn’t I just build it in javascript.

There are many great javascript libraries out there today. Here are my favorites:

• jQuery – One of my favorites, very easy to use for the avid web developer.
• YUI – A little more complicated, but things have gotten better with the release of YUI 3.

If your site currently has some Flash on it, I urge you to contact me. I can help you get rid of that pesky Flash that has your site missing out on all the mobile traffic.