St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to us.  That’s OK, we have so many ideas that we don’t mind if others pick them up and run with them.  Sometimes we actually want people to pick up our ideas and make something happen with them.

What got copied from us this time? Responsive Web Design in a WordPress website.  It’s the automatic changing of a single layout and server-side resizing of images based on the size of the screen of the users device.  This results in  faster loading, better looking web sites on mobile devices especially.  It also results in far less development time and costs for those who wish their web site to be viewable on multiple platforms.  To be fair, we weren’t the only ones who got copied, as we were not the original inventors of this technology, but we’ve taken the original open source code and turned into something special which has now lost a lot of it’s value.  Our product, still not released to the wild, is still better than WordPress’s implementation of it, but it will be automatically updated into every WordPress web site out there.

This will delay our project as we need to do lots of testing to see if if what we have and what they have will butt heads.  The Responsive Design technology was included in the latest update of WordPress (3.2).

Who copied it?  The developers at WordPress.  Who knows maybe they were working on this before we were, although they are usually pretty open about what they are working on and their was no mention of this new development direction that we picked up on.  Preliminary testing shows this update was rushed out the door and has adversely effected performance a bit as well.  We’re betting that will be fixed soon.

Are we mad about it? Nope. We think it’s a great move for WordPress and makes our WordPress offering even more valuable. We are also enjoying the fact that our mobile theme does more than the native Responsive web design in WordPress.

Are we worried? A little. It’s our job to find out what changes in technology will do to our clients web sites, web applications and/or data applications. And that’s exactly what we’re doing currently. This is a big change to the WordPress platform, but so far we’ve discovered the the extra effort we’ve put into great coding is paying off and there have been no changes needed to any web site.
We’ll keep you posted on that one.

You may think WordPress is just for blogs.  It may be true that WordPress was first created with blogging in mind.  It may also be true that WordPress is most commonly used for blogs versus traditional web sites.  However, we’ve always been innovators here at Dream Designs, after all we have the Einstein of Web Design leading us.  We frequently, but not always use WordPress to create a “traditional” appearing web site.

WordPress sites don't have to behave like a blog . . .

Why would we do this?  We’ll talk about that later in the article but first we’d like to announce a new member in the Dream Designs family of clients:

Atlanta Computer Repair:
We’ve created a WordPress web site for them using our Cheap WordPress Design package.  This means the client gets a great looking web site and is able to update, add and manage the content of  the web site, including each picture on the each article or page themselves.

How is it different than a traditional WordPress Blog?
There are non traditional adjustments to this implementation of WordPress:

• Custom jQuery Slider at the top of the home page
• Custom home page
• It has no articles (yet)
  • A new page which will list all the blog posts (articles) is ready to go, but won’t be implemented until there are actually some posts.
• A custom “bottom section”
• Automated Database backups
• SEO features

We’ve just created an mobile theme for this blog.  We hope you enjoy it.  We like it because it’s “responsive”  which means it automatically adjusts for any size screen.  It even has some server side programming to resize images!  It can be used as a full screen desktop theme as well but we like the full sized theme we have.

We’ve combined our new mobile theme, which we are tentatively calling Flxi, with a a “sniffer” script which detects the device being used.  If it’s a tablet or phone then it gives them the same content but with the Flxi theme. It also includes a link in the footer to bypass this script and view the mobile version.  Once in the mobile version, the link in the footer will switch you back to the desktop version.  We did this because our main theme looks great and is highly readable in all but the smallest of devices.

Here’s a link to bypass the preview it.  Remember, it will look different depending on the size of the device.  For instance if you are on a desktop PC or a laptop it will have three columns.  If it’s a much smaller device, then it will only have one column so please try it on a couple devices…

Mobile theme

Create a Post in WordPress Video

WordPress, a web application that supports not just reverse chronological order articles, hierarchical pages, a WYSIWYG content editor with a working image/file uploader and embedder and tons of other features, sounds a little intimidating at first.  But the beauty of WordPress is that it’s easy to use.

Yes WordPress is powerful, secure, has tons of plug-ins and a huge user community.  But it also has it’s basics down.  If you are a basic level user it just doesn’t get much easier than this to work.  Other Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal, PhpNuke, Joomla will have even the fastest of learners pulling their hair out within a manner of days.  Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s them.  WordPress is so widely customizable that it can do just about any job that they can.  But without the heartache that the others cause.

WordPress version 3,.0 has just been released.  This latest  version of WordPress has some exciting features for the more technically inclined.  It’s touting more features for those out there that aren’t.  The trouble is that some of these new features just make it easier for them to destroy their blog. 

There are also some disturbing things about this latest version for those of us “in the know”.  We aren’t going to speak more until we’ve confirmed some things.  But  we recommend holding off for just a little while until we (and the many tech writers out there) have had a few days to do some testing.

Look for the good, the bad and the ugly (if there is any) here.
UPDATE:
WordPress 3.0 is definitely safe enough. A word of caution, if you use the new “custom menu” feature however, your existing menu will be lost forever. If this happens to you, don’t worry we can fix it.
We recommend upgrading your blog to v 3.0

Today we announce a new theme. This one isn’t just a WordPress Theme, it’s also been ported form many other content management systems and even a plain HTML/CSS version.

Simple and clean, the Desert Sage Theme has two columns, has a fixed width of 1000 pixels and has clean color scheme of light browns. It has a Search Engine friendly text Headline and Tag line space in the header.

• Drupal
• Joomla
• HTML
• DotNetNuke

Support, download and preview links after the fold below:
Continue reading “Free Theme – Desert Sage” »