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Announcing FourTen Creative’s first Wordpres theme for Free Public Release!

Gifted is a stylish two column theme designed with managing a website for non-profits and small businesses in mind. Ready out of the box with drop-down page navigation and multiple extra widgetized sidebar areas for more content control.

Learn more.

Check out the new site from Crossway International, a mission agency serving among other places, orphans in Sudan. Crossway wanted a system to promote and process sponsorships for their 499 children. At first a daunting task, we found multiple methods of automation and batch processing to pull the data into WordPress and make management a breeze.

Challenge #1 - Are you gonna type all that into WordPress? Nope. This article demonstrated a method for a batch import of data from a spreadsheet to create all of the posts. Beware however that you need a different timestamp for each post or paging and post ordering break down.

Challenge #2 – So many pictures! Photoshop provides great functionality for batch processing of images for the web. Then, WordPress’s flash uploader does us the favor of creating thumbnails. I thought I might be pushing the limits of the flash uploader, but it passed with flying colors.

Challenge #3 - How do we keep track of these kids once they’re in WordPress? Luckily, each child is assigned an ID# which became our key variable in the custom template creation. A single post template called up the post, the image and dynamically populated a response form field for easy organization and identification when a visitor to the site wanted to support an orphan.

Redirect to a PayPal payment option list and voilà! Check out the site to see the acrobatics in action and consider making a donation to the orphans.

If you haven’t realized before, WordPress is on a steady track to release updates and fixes to it’s code on a regular basis. 2.7 Was a big visual and functional leap forward and 2.8 seems to extend some of the functionality that improved plugin and update management to themes. For my clients using custom themes, this won’t be so significant, but the folks at WP also claim an overall speed improvment. That will be much appreciated!

My favorite ‘no duh’ fix that probably wasn’t a ‘no duh’ to implement is the ability to have multiple copies of widgets. This is especially useful when creating multiple page templates utilizing different sidebars. Previously, if you had used your Latest Posts widget on Sidebar 1, tough luck on Sidebar 2!

Also, if you haven’t played with ‘Screen Options’ in the upper right since it was implemented in 2.7, try it out now with new improvements. I try to set new WP users up with a more simplified screen as soon as they log in for the first time to keep them from getting distracted by all of the possibilities WP offers.

So, way to go WP folks! And if you are looking for your site to be upgraded, I am also offering a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) package that includes two hours of tweaking to get you better search results to generate more traffic to your site.

Recently I have been trying to help simplify the process of maintaining a website and keep up with a perceived need to be active in social media. My clients are often stepping out of their comfort zones to do such a thing, so I am happy to introduce a great way to kill three birds with one stone. Yes, I said three, and no I don’t advocate killing birds… though I do chuck pebbles at them at about 5 in the morning on occasion.

Step One: Use Wordpress to power your website. Leverage the blog feature to maintain current content to keep visitors interested in your site or at least create the illusion of activity.

Step Two: Install the Twitter Tools plugin. Give the plugin your Twitter account details and choose your settings. I prefer the plugin to create tweets with a link back to my blog. You can also publish your Twitter feed on your site or create digest blog posts from your Twitter activity.

Step Three: Login in to your Facebook account and install the Twitter application to republish your Twitter feed to your Facebook status update.

Congratulations. You are now in the loop. Obviously none of this work is my own, but thanks to the talented folks working on those projects you can benefit. I can also set you up a great WordPress powered site with a custom designed theme for your business or non-profit.

SEO is vitally important to the design of any website, but finding good tools can be exhausting, with everyone on the internet claiming to know something about it. Here are the two starting points for my SEO work that I hope you find useful.

Website Grader from Hubspot: Put your url in the box and bam! You ‘ll get an easy to read report on your basic SEO performance and suggestions on how to improve it.

Currently, I am working on Woodanew.com to get meta descriptions, font tags, search engine listings and a solid htaccess file in place.

Another great resource for sites powered by WordPress is this award winning article from Yoast. Aside from providing some solid plugins and being Dutch (which gets you a long ways in my book), yoast has been doing some great work making SEO accessible to the general WordPress world. He has enough pointers in there to keep you (or me!) busy for a while.

Need some SEO work done? Contact me and let’s get workin!

Weberconsultingroup.net is live and is a great example of extending the brand of your company into your website. Weber Consulting had an existing logo and identity package (letterhead, business cards, envelopes, etc) that provided a great jumping-off point for their new site. The arrow represents movement and progress for Weber and their clients, while providing a great visual theme to set off content and provide a color scheme for the site.

The best part was that this project went live in a total of two weeks from first contact. Maybe organizing your web content ahead of time will be a future blog post…