With every custom blog, especially for photographers, I have usually been required to add some kind of image gallery plugin for WordPress. I have tried several, but found them all lacking in one way or another. Some end up in a Flash player, making them hard to customize and invisible on mobile phones. Some are not user-friendly as far as uplaoding images, editing galleries and then insterting the galleries into pages. While developing the inner workings PhotographyBlogSites.com, I decided to start from scratch and build my own. It has been in somewhat limited release so far as it has been tested on PhotographyBlogSites and put through the ringer on a few recent custom sites that are about to launch. My goal was to build a comprehensive image gallery plugin that would be easy to use, versatile, visible on mobile phones, and highly customizable. I also wanted to add the all important SEO

Posted In: Blog, WordPress Development.

Cross posted from IdentityKitchen... Now, you know how proud we are of our Search Engine Optimized, Wordpress powered, custom portfolio blogsites. What if there were an entry-level, template-driven, DIY, portfolio blogsite available? No more updating your blog at one address and your portfolio at another. No more calling your webmaster to make changes to your site, update your entire site as easily as creating a blog post. You can even customize the site to match your brand. Now, what if it was affordable to everyone and included installation and set-up? Interested? Sign up here for more information. Here's a blurry sneak peek... Some added details of my own: There are a lot of sides to this project, including some exciting resources for anyone, whether they use the new BlogSites or not... There will be an FAQ and tutorial site, complete with screencast videos for everything WordPress. There will be support forums for plugins, and technical issues. SEO Image Galleries.

Posted In: Blog, WordPress Development.
Tags: photography, photography blog, photographyblogsites, WordPress

Over the last year or so, I have worked on some great projects with designer Ellen Petty, founder and head designer of Identity Kitchen. I was proud to most recently work on the actual Identity Kitchen site itself, which got a major overhaul for the new year. Identity Kitchen provides branding and identity design as well as custom blog and website design and I get to help turn some of those designs into  working WordPress sites. I recently posted some examples of our collaborations. The new Identity Kitchen site was not just a face-lift or simple redesign but a complete rethinking of everything. By combining the formerly separate portfolio site and blog all into one WordPress installation, the content and structure of the site was improved, the search engine optimization was improved, and the backend became one place to add and edit all the content. We were also able to use

Posted In: Blog, WordPress Development.
Tags: custom wordpress, web development, WordPress

Teen Truth started as a video documentary by Horizon Intertainment, created by handing teens video cameras to get their take on school violence shortly after the Columbine massacre in '99. It has since grown into a series of documentaries and Teen Truth Live, a live motivational speaking event that has now spoken in front of millions of students across the country. Their website had been a static HTML site, difficult to update and lacking the ability to comment or interact in any way. Producers JC Pohl and Erahm Christopher asked their original designer, David Richards to update his original design and brought me on to program the site using WordPress as a backend. David's new design stayed true to the original idea and maintained the well-established brand of Teen Truth, while modernizing it, bringing some greatly improved navigation and adding some moving pieces that really bring the site to life. By

Posted In: Blog, WordPress Development.
Tags: clients, custom web design, web clients, WordPress, WordPress Themes

One of the great things about working with talented people is that the end product is something you wouldn't have been able to accomplish on your own. I have worked on several sites now with the talented brand and identity designer Ellen Petty of Identity Kitchen (see previous post with examples), all custom blogs designed by Identity Kitchen and programmed by myself using WordPress. But the site for Studio Diana is an all-in-one portfolio site and blog, the culmination of a lot of time and planning about what the ultimate possibilities of WordPress might be. With one login and only one site to edit, there is access to several categories of photo galleries, essentially unlimited pages, and a fully integrated blog. The design is customized on every page, with varying layouts and thumbnails for each section that really bring this site beyond the typical design. At the same time, the look

Posted In: Blog, WordPress Development.
Tags: clients, custom web design, web clients, web design, wedding photography blog, WordPress Themes

Over the last few months, I have done several projects in partnership with the talented brand and identity designer, Ellen Petty of  Identity Kitchen. It has been a great change of pace to have someone else provide the design, allowing me to focus on the programming and coding of the site. With all of our sites, we try to incorporate some level of social media interaction. Custom blogs generally get a Twitter feed with a custom design and prominent links to any other sites the client wants to feature. This could be Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. Here is a look at a few of the projects: TheUnbride.com The Unbride is a blog that covers unusual wedding ideas, from all of the different vendors, to interesting venues, etc. Building the site took a lot of advanced Customization of WordPress using different views depending on which category we are viewing. See it in action here: http://theunbride.com/ TheUnbride.com Click

Posted In: Blog, WordPress Development.
Tags: clients, custom web design, programming, web clients, WordPress

Sauce Creative Group does some great design work for some major brands, including a lot of recent work with Redbull. So when they asked me to help turn their design into a Wordpress site, it was a great opportunity for me - not to mention a chance to just build a site and not worry about the design process myself. The biggest job I had on this was creating the fading slideshow at the top of every page. I found a sample site that had something similar, but i had to tweak the code to be more flexible. Now it reads any image uploaded to the right folder. So all they have to do is upload some new images and they have a new slideshow. I will try to add a description of what I did, because it is a pretty slick addition to any site and is user-friendly enough for

Posted In: Blog, Featured, WordPress Development.
Tags: clients, web clients, web design, WordPress