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 »

In a past post, I compared several different job boards which I utilized in my daily life. I summarized the most effective job boards as those which cost a freelancer a very insignificant amount of money, did not spam the freelancer, were not overly intrusive to the normal business operations, were easy to sign up for, and did not compare freelancers to one another. Generally speaking the post was met with nods of approval; after all, why should my earnings on one site determine whether or not I was a decent web designer? For all that site knows, I could have already grossed double the amount reflected using a different service. And, additionally, why should I limit myself to one service when I know that job posters will be posting to different sites? And after educating myself and working towards certifications with W3C and Adobe, why should I pay for another web site to certify me?

Then, I recently noticed that CSS Mania had released their own job board. There is no subscription fee; the site is paid for by the advertisements on the main CSS. Read more »

When going into design, the majority of students are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. They were the kid who was always drawing and painting, the one whose parents probably covered their fridge in water colors. So, they would certainly think I’m crazy to say they should also program.

However, design is not art.

There, I said it.

One of the most common misconceptions I receive from my family is that I am in some shape or form an artist. While I do illustrations (such as the one pictured in this post – which, by the way, was inspired by this Adobe Illustrator coffee cup tutorial), I do not consider myself an artist. Granted, I am currently working toward a degree in software engineering, with design as my secondary major (and the way I put the food on the table), but this is why I have come to the conclusion that programming is an invaluable skill to any designer. Read more »

Finally!

I’m finally happy to announce that I was able to send live the code I’ve been hashing and dreaming up for the site is now live. You can see a footer now on every page, in addition to a few other minor changes to the site. Also, this past weekend we upgraded to WordPress 2.8, and activated Akismet in order to control the spam comments we receive.

It feels very good to update the code for the site. As it stands, it was getting pretty stale, and I’m one who always tries to keep things up-to-date. Granted, we weren’t necessarily out-of-date, so much as there were many changes that I felt needed to be done, namely tweaking the comments page and adding in the footer. This site will always be an on-going project for me; as should all designer’s sites. Read more »