It feels strange changing the header on my emails, but that’s what this week has turned into: change.

This week, I am moving six hundred miles away from Las Vegas, Nevada, into the city of Sacramento, California, in part to further my education in software engineering (I am learning this to further my programming skills; I will still be designing) as well as to look into more design-type jobs.

While Las Vegas has plenty of jobs in my area of expertise, I am looking forward to the change. It is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and now that I finally have the opportunity, I’ve definitely become terribly excited over it. I will be leaving Las Vegas Thursday morning and stopping in Fresno for the night, and then continuing onward and upwards to Sacramento the following Friday morning. Read more »

Generally speaking, WordPress doesn’t like to create two post pages. It takes getting the platform out of its comfort zone to force it to make it do something it doesn’t like.

Technically, my own site has two post pages. It displays the first few characters of a post (first one thousand characters, to be exact) and displays them on the home page, and then takes the rest of my posts (all content included) and displays it on my Blog page. However, to be really savvy, it just takes a little bit of PHP plus maybe a plugin, and your web site’s guests will never know the difference! Read more »

Lately, there has been an advent of horizontal page designs that I’ve noticed. I even attempted to do one before a contract was cancelled. My experience with this design taught me a few things about such things.

For one thing, allow me to introduce some horizontal designs that I’ve liked. This musician’s site was the inspiration for a design which I was working on at the time through its scrolling features and whatnot. I also viewed this CSS gallery of horizontal designs while grabbing some ideas of what did and did not work for a horizontal site. Read more »

I rarely make my political beliefs public, as I feel that they are something which I hold close to my heart. Nevertheless, I am always willing to take on any project, no matter how controversial it may be – and that includes political or religious projects. My work with Forward Focus Media can only be described as one word: rewarding. Honestly, I have greatly enjoyed the month of work which I put into the site, and the month which I worked closely with the people behind the company.

That being said, I’m quite sure that they give their clients the same amount of brilliant treatment. If your political beliefs happen to fall under “libertarian” or “conservative” and you happen to be politically involved, this Alabama-based firm can certainly help you out – but how? Why not check out their site to find out!

Specifically, my work with this site was to customize a pre-built WordPress template. The original design was very nice, I must admit, but I saw many ways in which it could be changed in order to better suit the site’s purpose. From coding an RSS puller in order to display their latest posts to editing a Twitter widget, the facelift to this design was actually pretty large; I may as well have written the theme myself from scratch. However, Forward Focus had already selected this template, and I noted that certain things could be thrown out altogether and that certain things could be redone. We started small, working on the graphics you see – the logo was provided, but I did create all of the graphics such as the Twitter and Facebook graphics (after all, graphics were how I was pulled into design in the first place).

There are a few fundamental features in a WordPress theme. To create a custom theme, a developer must simply have a functions.php, a stylesheet, and an index.php with the loop in it. However, the Internet is expanding, and not only are themes becoming more and more complex with a greater amount of options, but further additions are being added to the amount of files included in your average theme.

This post, however, is not directed at the aged WordPress designer who has been churning out themes since 1.5. This post, instead, is directed at designers which are simply just beginning to explore the possibilities of WordPress.

I was one such designer not too long ago. I became acquainted with WordPress through a job opportunity – I was hired by a company to create and edit WordPress themes. I received a day or two of training learning the needed PHP and other tidbits – such as what certain files did, and how to install themes. To date, I have been programming WordPress themes for about a year now – whether editing them for SEO, or creating completely new themes, or even redesigning other themes. Through my work, I have discovered the power behind not just the CMS, but also through the lesser-known power of index.php and hierarchy. Read more »