Hello everyone, and sorry for the long absence! I’ve been up to my ears for the past few months in website work, catalog work and family visits. (It’s still raining babies in our family. I’ve now got a new baby nephew, and a grandson on the way, bringing the baby total to 8 in just under 3 years. More on that later.)

I’m really excited about all the Wordpress-based websites we’ve been building lately, and I and wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about our process and show you some of the latest sites we’ve done.

All our sites are now built on Wordpress using Thesis. Wordpress is a powerful opensource blogging platform, and Thesis is a brilliantly flexible and SEO-friendly framework that helps you to customize your Wordpress-based site. I do all the design work, and the multi-talented Doyle Calvert does all the programming and behind-the-scenes magic. Between us, we have spent the past 8 months getting Wordppress/Thesis to do some pretty amazing things. Here’s a sampling:

DKG & Associates

This site was built for a Dallas law firm, who wanted an easy way to update their own site and help more people find them on the web. See the testimonials in the right column? Those change out each time you refresh a page. Here’s what’s cool: each of those testimonials is set up as a blog post, which gets pulled into the template sidebar automatically, and also shows up on the “Testimonials” page. To add a new testimonial, all the client has to do is make a new post, choose the category “testimonials”, and the rest happens automatically.

We showed our client how to use Windows Live Writer to add stuff to his site, so that he has total control over his own content. He was very pleased with the final result.

R2 Technologies

Years ago, I did a static website for this Dallas placement agency, but so many cool new tools have come around since then that it was time for an update. The big new thing we did for R2 was to help them get all their job openings online, so that potential clients can subscribe to the site to stay up-to-date on the latest openings. We also tied their blog posts in with their Twitter account, so that each time the client posts a new job, the site automatically sends a tweet out to all their followers. So much easier than the old way!

Check out Doyle’s nifty 3-part footer. The Testimonials in the middle column automatically rotate out each time you go to a new page. Both the testimonials and the job postings are controlled easily through categories: when the client tags their post with “testimonial”, it shows up at the bottom and on the Testimonials page. When they tag it with “job posting”, it shows up on the home page and under Jobs.

Also, check out the calendar that we added on Networking. This is a little Wordpress plugin that allows our client to easily add events to a calendar. This would have all been such a PAIN, and very expensive, before Wordpress.

Joe Rotella Says

Joe Rotella, a prominent speaker and usability consultant, had been hosting his blog with Wordpress.com (the free Wordpress site), but he was frustrated with the limited control he had over the design and organization, and turned to us for help. I explained the advantages of having a self-hosted site (your own URL, total control over the design) and helped him set up his first self-hosted site.

He wanted this site to tie in visually with his company’s site, but still look like his own. So I picked up some colors and elements from his company’s site, but featured his face and name prominently in the header, along with the various ways to reach him (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn). I was really happy with the final result. And Joe was ecstatic to finally have a site that looks and behaves just like he wants. He has started blogging regularly, and finally has a site that is easy to use and helps to spread his reach.

(Side note: Doyle had some fits with the dropdown menus for this site, which surprisingly enough is NOT a simple thing to do in Wordpress. But never one to be outdone by technology, Doyle has just recently figured out a way to make them behave properly, so stay tuned for an update.)

Hill Roofing

Steve Hill has been in the roofing business for over 25 years, always relying on traditional methods of advertising (door hangers, flyers, ads, and word of mouth). Doyle convinced Steve that a Wordpress-based site would help a lot more people across Texas to find out about him.

I designed this site to look like a real house with a roofer on top, with the phone number featured prominently, and storm clouds brewing in the background, like a typical Texas thunderstom. Doyle made the cool Flash animation and did all the other development work.

We faced some interesting technical challenges on this site, such as making the full-width footer “sticky.” See how the houses at the bottom of the page stay with the footer? That was a heck of a challenge, requiring Doyle to spend a lot of time researching and experimenting to get it to work. In fact, our site is the ONLY one I’ve actually seen that works exactly like it should. Others break when you size the browser window too small.

I also like how we made the cloud background static, which gives a cool effect when you scroll down the longer pages. I enjoyed creating the little details: the gutter that runs down the right side, and the bricks, which I created from a photo I did of the bricks on our own house.

Notice also that we’ve started using the large 3-part footer as a standard item, which I think works really well. Why shouldn’t the footer be full of useful stuff too?

Well, that’s about enough for now. We’ve got several other Wordpress/Thesis sites in the works, which I’ll post when they’re done. I also FINALLY updated my own site using Wordpress/Thesis. (More on that later.)