• Coffee House
• Church
• Gift Retailer
• Local News Organization
• Job Seeker Portfolio

On another note, I’m also working on a way of handling version control for WordPress themes. I must admit I’m clueless when it comes to proper programming version control using Git or Subversion, and when I’ve searched for help with using version control for WordPress themes, I’ve come up empty. So I’m trying to create something that works.

I’m going to try explaining static vs. dynamic web pages by comparing them to how a pizza parlor makes pizza. Let’s pretend that each slice of pizza represents a single web page, and that each slice’s ingredients (sauce, peppers, mushrooms, etc.) represent the content of that particular page.

Most pizza parlors have pizzas-by-the-slice that are sitting on the counter, waiting to be devoured. Pizza-by-the-slice is similar to static web pages in the following ways:

• Both are made before you arrive
• Both are already cooked, ready to “consume”
• Both are limited in offerings

Now suppose you want more offerings than what’s available with pizza-by-the-slice. Unfortunately, as in most pizza parlors, you can’t get only a slice of whatever pizza you want (except maybe the Jackson Creek Pizza Co. in Medford). You usually have to order a brand new pizza. That’s where dynamic web pages are similar to the custom pizza you order:

• Both are made after you arrive
• Both have to be “cooked” before you “consume” them
• Both can be customized to feature whatever ingredients you wish.

So as you can see, both forms of pizza are like both forms of web pages. Each has their benefits and disadvantages:

• Pizza-by-the-slice is good if you just want a basic pizza to munch on. Static web pages are good if you just want a simple site that’s not going to require any changes.
• Customized pizza is preferable if you want something customized to your tastes with only the ingredients you choose. Dynamic web pages are preferably if you have a lot of “ingredients” that you want to be able to customize.

Now this analogy fails in one aspect: With the pizza-by-the-slice, the pizza is ready to eat, whereas the custom pizza can take up to a half hour to bake. This is not the case with web publishing. While it does take a few milliseconds to “bake” dynamic web pages, you barely notice the difference.

I hoped this explained static vs. dynamic web pages. Have any questions? Please leave a comment or question below.

I’ve used all three methods. After 16 years of making websites, I prefer to use a web-based CMS like WordPress.

In November 1995 I launched my first web page, called the Happy Page.

Yes, it looks awful. But this was back in 1995 and Al Gore had barely been released from the delivery room for giving birth to the Information Superhighway. There were few WYSIWYG editors back then and they all were so UN-WYSIWYG that they were useless. The only way to make reliable websites was to write HTML from scratch. That was it.

I appreciate the early days of hand-coding HTML because I actually learned to write in HTML, something I wouldn’t have done with a WYSIWYG editor. I also don’t think I would have followed the progession of HTML to XHTML to HTML5 (or CSS3 and JavaScript for that matter) had I not started working on websites back when everything had to practically be done by hand.

Years later I saw the first usable WYSIWYG editors, including Adobe Dreamweaver (Macromedia Dreamweaver at the time), Microsoft FrontPage, and Adobe Pagemill.
Something these WYSIWYG editors allowed was for you to set up templates where the same items like the header and footer could repeat on different pages. This beat the previous method of copying and pasting code from page to page, allowing me to concentrate on the content more.

From 2001-2005 I blogged a lot using a web-based CMS called Blogger. Afterwards, I switched to WordPress because Blogger didn’t handle publishing to my hosting server very well. I needed something like WordPress that would dynamically generate my pages and manage my content. While WordPress was great for managing content, it seemed at first difficult to make themes or templates for. While I knew how to make a few styling changes with CSS, I couldn’t figure out how to make WordPress sites look more like a website and less like a blog without intensive coding that would often break. In 2008 I built my first WordPress theme from scratch, and while I enjoyed the learning experience, I felt it took much longer than it should have.

With the release of WordPress 3.x, I’ve seen WordPress evolved from being a blogging platform to being a real content management system. It’s my system of choice, given the pros and cons of other notable platforms like Drupal and Joomla.

In the last few months, I’ve built five websites using WordPress, many involving conversion where an existing site is replaced with a new site using WordPress for CMS. I’ve clocked myself and discovered I’m able to develop from bare content to a customized live site in less than eight hours. That’s impressive – not on my part – but on WordPress’ part.

So why do I use WordPress? Because I’ve got to manage my content somehow. I think WordPress’ usability, flexibility and reliability make it the best choice.

What content management system do you use for your website? Do you like it? Please leave your comments below.

I’m not a WordPress expert, but I’ve used it for five years, building over a half dozen websites using it for content management. In the last few months, I’ve managed to crank out five of sites using WordPress for content management along with a combination of Child Theme development (something I explained here) and plugins. I’ve seen WordPress evolve from an alternative to Blogger, to become a full blown content management system that is easy and fast to use.

Over the course of the next month, I’d like to show particularly how churches can take advantage of the WordPress platform.

Another coffee label design in less than an hour, this time with a house standing for “House Blend”.

I sketched out the design early this morning. I was hoping to put in a little more texture and have a “Orange St.” street sign at the bottom, but I ran out of time. One of the challenges of this Design Something Daily exercise is to crank out something in less than an hour. When you’re pressed for time, some fine tuning and tweaking can end up getting ditched.

I decided to restart an old daily exercise I practiced about a year ago, which was designing something from concept to finish in less than an hour. I had created an assortment of coffee labels in the past under the fictitious name “Orange Street Coffee Roasters”. Here’s an espresso coffee label I put together in Illustrator.

Presentation graphics for Slate Creek Homeowners Association. Designed to show homeowners where money’s going.

Short animation I made for a math class over the Labor Day weekend.

Right now this site doesn’t have a whole lot of content, but it’s planned to feature an e-commerce storefront and online scheduling.

This site will likely evolve in the next few months, but our goal for now was just to get something working to replace the old site.

What I really like about more recent versions of WordPress is the ability to quickly get customized websites up and running by making Child themes. In previous versions of WordPress, I usually would design the entire theme from scratch which took days.

I’ve been looking forward to it all week. If you’re interested in learning about email marketing, I suggest you come.

Plan how you’ll use email marketing

First, plan out how you’ll use email marketing to benefit your customers. You can start by simply reminding your recipients (the people who choose to give you their email addresses) about your booth, products and services at the next market day. You could add a coupon for recipients to bring to your booth, or perhaps feature a particular product or service. Also, you can have links from the email back to your website where recipients can get more detailed information about your business, contact you and get driving directions.

Build your recipient list

Build a list of recipients by providing a sign-up sheet at your booth, informing your customers what to expect when they sign up. You should also provide a sign up form on your website too. In both cases, be sure to get the recipient’s email address and first and last name. You’ll want the recipient’s name for tracking and personalization purposes. Also, some email service providers won’t allow you to add an email to your distribution list without a name.

Whatever you do, remember that you want recipients who want to receive your emails. Don’t waste time trying to blast millions of people with offers that they don’t care about anyway.

Set a schedule and stick to it

Since you hopefully show up at farmers markets on a regular basis, you should email your recipients likewise. Don’t have them sign up to receive… (wait for it)… (wait for it)… nothing! Also, don’t sandblast them with offers every single day. Keep it simple, regular and timely. These emails should be friendly reminders designed to drive recipients to your booth so they’ll become loyal customers.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a marketing rockstar

Today I went to a farmers market and bought produce from three vendors. Neither of them mentioned websites or email newsletters. But they did have vinyl banners overhead each booth with a name, city and phone number. It would be a piece of cake to start an email marketing campaign that simply reminded customers of the next market and what produce to expect.

There’s always going to be many people who want promotional material the old fashioned way, but every piece of paper and postage stamp add up. As a small business, you have the potential to save hundreds each month in production costs.

Today we’ve talked about how email marketing can save your small business some cash. Tomorrow, we’ll brainstorm some reasons why small businesses should implement email marketing campaigns.

What I did today was download the Twenty Ten Five theme, a replica of the original Twenty Ten theme that uses HTML5 markup. Then I made a simple Child theme with some modifications to the header and CSS. The minimum you need to do is make a new folder with a style.css file that has something like this at the top:

/*
Theme Name: Twenty Ten Child
Description: Child theme for the Twenty Ten theme
Author: Your name here
Template: twentyten
*/

#site-title a {
color: #009900;
}


The Template refers to the original parent theme you wish to refer to, in this case it’s twentyten. The @import url(“../twentyten/style.css”) pulls the parent theme’s CSS. You’ll either need to import the parent’s CSS this way or copy and paste into your Child Theme’s style.css. Oddly enough, the child theme will automatically use the parent’s PHP structure for rendering pages but not the parent’s CSS.

Anyway, child themes are an easy way of modifying an existing theme without breaking it or having to go through the trouble of creating a WordPress theme from scratch (both of which I’ve done).

If you upload some images using the WordPress image uploader and add the [gallery] shortcode to your post, you’ll see all the thumbnails together. However, there’s no way to insert something like a headline for certain thumbnails, unless you use the WordPress image uploader to manually insert code for the thumbnails. I find this problematic, as it inserts hard code into your post that won’t update if you do something like change the name of the image, or switch to a new theme.

To insert multiple galleries on one page, first start a new post and add whatever images you want in just that gallery. For example, I started a post called “Email Marketing” to show some of my email marketing designs. Then add more posts with more images until you’ve basically got a post with images for each gallery you want. When you Publish these pages, be sure to set the Visibility to Private. This will make these posts invisible to the public, yet you’ll be able to access the images elsewhere in WordPress.

After that, you’ll want to start a new page or post, which will display your multiple galleries. Ctrl or Command click the Add New button to open a new tab on your browser, because you’ll need to access the Posts to look up the post ID. Wherever you want a gallery, add [gallery id=”X” ]. If you switch to the other tab and list your Posts, hover your mouse over the title of the particular post containing your image gallery, where you’re see something like “…post=123…” in the Status Bar. Put that number in the Gallery shortcode in order to pull up that post’s gallery, so in this case, we’d have [gallery id=”123″ ]. After that, repeat the same steps until you have all the galleries you want on the page.

You can do similar tricks without having to worry about shortcodes with plugins, but I’m glad to have discovered this method because it allows me to use the WordPress image uploader and I can display a portfolio of different media. Previously I was having to write loops in my WordPress theme to get the images to display properly.

Any questions, please let me know.

I coded the email template using TextWrangler, testing in Firefox with Firebug, and then final testing and deployment using AWeber Email Marketing’s services.

5-second homage to Dr. Who’s TARDIS I threw together in After Effect just for fun.

I built a small child theme today, and it pretty much is the same as the original TwentyTen theme except the header image is gone, the fonts are different (using Droid Sans), and the archives show thumbnails.