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 »

I am very surprised at myself.

And I don’t mean in a bad way. I mean as in – wow, I can’t believe it’s a redesign!

As you can see, the comment form is back to where it was before. Provided it’s not abused by spammers again, it should hopefully stay as it is. If spammers do choose to abuse it as much as they possibly can, expect a much stricter captcha to be put into it. Oh, and yes, I’m aware that it disappears after you submit it; that’s to prevent you from re-submitting it. No, really, it is!

There are a lot more small tweaks to this theme than meets the eye. The older one was a bit more static; it worked pretty well, but I mostly wanted to do a few things with this design that I hadn’t done before. Read more »

Today, I looked at my design on a Dell monitor whose resolution is 1024 x 768. I was surprised at how cluttered my design had become; the original aspect of the design was to remove the clutter, and make the design itself one which was very sleek and elegant, similar to my older design in which there were four navigation choices, and one place for content.

Well, allow me to clarify. I like the top of the site; the choice of very simple horizontal navigation and a central logo. I like the front page, with its “Welcome” written in a sans-serif and a pulled title and 200 characters from the latest post in my blog. Read more »

It seems to me that spammers are getting more and more creative.

One of the most recent spams I received was actually through two IM conversations. The first was on GTalk; I have a GTalk account set up specially for BeLink’d to communicate with clients et cetera without utilizing my personal account. Well, I received a friend request; not sure what it was, I accepted.

Later that day, while working on a site, I received an IM asking if it was a good time to discuss web development software that I had been solicited in the past over my work line. I told said marketer to please remove me from their contact list when they initially called me, and now I was being IM’d by them.

And that wasn’t the last time. I also use Skype for personal, and received a friends request from a random person. I add them… and it turns out to be yet another marketer. Wonderful. Blocked and removed; the major annoyance, however, is that now they attempt to message me and send me notifications, which are… excessively annoying. Read more »