First, apologies to my subscribers for not writing a lot recently, but I have been working some overtime, and redesigning my website’s interior pages. But I was working on my portfolio page and thought I would share what I have done. All in all, it is not overly complicated, but I like that it is clean and simple. You’ll also get to see the beginnings of my redesign of my interior pages (just keep in mind that it is not finished yet). Take a look at my new portfolio page so far:
If you don’t know who Matt is, then you are missing out on some really great web design articles. I highly recommend reading his blog, Echo Enduring due to the topics he writes about. Personally, I think they are more thought provoking posts than what most blogs write about. Yes, he does tutorials sometimes, but you get the sense that Matt is really passionate about what goes into a design, and loves to talk about it.
What I didn’t know, was that Matt is more than just a designer, illustrator, and writer. He is pretty handy at developing as well. I had the pleasure of looking through and using his app Survd, an easy to use survey builder, before a lot of people did. Not only does Survd have a nice looking website, but it is incredibly intuitive to use while giving you control of how you want your surveys to look. Check it out…..NOW!
So I was asked to teach a second class to some of the people who I taught the first. To recap, I had showed them the basic HTML tags they will need to know, some extremely basic CSS and it’s syntax, and how to slice up a page in Photoshop. They went and built a web page on their own, and now they wanted to know more. My problem was, I wasn’t sure what to teach them. One of them wanted to learn some Flash, and while I could have shown them some basic animation stuff, the more I had thought about it, the more and more this made less sense to do. Why would I show them something that would only complicate things, when there was still more they needed to know that was far more important. So I was kind of at a loss on what to teach.
Ok, there wasn’t a plan, I totally flew by the seat of my pants. Mostly because I couldn’t anticipate the questions I was going to get, and my outline the previous time went to crap within minutes of starting. How did it go, you ask? Fairly well, actually!
UPDATE 6/1/11: Added one line to the end of the second chunk of code (wp_reset_query). If you do not have this and place that block above the loop, the id does not get reset and will display the wrong content. Worked if after the loop, but probably a bad idea no to include it.
NOTE: Added one line of code to exlude this content block from search (‘exclude_from_search’ => true,).
There are plenty of ways to use WordPress as a CMS (content management system). There are different plugins that allow you to do it, like MultiEdit, but recently I have been working on building the new corporate site for work, and saw something that my manager did to make WordPress into a very powerful CMS. Normally I build sites in WordPress so that the client can make changes to the main content and widget areas themsevles. That doesn’t require any additional code or tinkering. But what if you need additional areas that the client has to be able to edit themselves as well?
In come “custom post types” to the rescue. I will show you how to easily do this to your own WordPress site, and it only takes a few minutes. I don’t know where my manager got the code for it, but I was impressed with how easy it is.
I thought, if I have a copy of Survd, I might as well use it considering how easy it is to use. The survey consists of questions that pertain to front-end developers, not web designers.
Please take a couple minutes and take my survey!
