The new CustomerServiceAtoZ.com website is a full install of WordPress using a custom-designed template system based upon the new book cover art design.  It also makes use of several social media widgets as well as linking directly to all associated socail media pages.  As Larry is able to create more media, it will also be included on the blog/site along with other social media goodies!

Actual development time and costs were reduced to a minimum as Larry loved the original design concept presented to him.  With the rough layout approved so quickly, it took only a few days to create the new template system and install it to WordPress.  Once that was completed, it was simply a matter of adding content for pages and posts and making a few minor graphic design adjustments.

You may visit Larry’s new site at CustomerServiceAtoZ.com

The past few weeks have been extremely hectic with all sorts of things going on, so it has been hard concentrating on getting work done on my own sites.  It took a while to get back around to it, but now all of the bugs are worked out and the portfolio page is done.  I have uploaded about a dozen or so screenshots of some recent work for now, with even more coming soon!!!

Check it out and let me know what you think – feedback is always appreciated!

If you are in need of web/graphic design services or just need reliable web hosting services, be sure to Contact Us today!

Since this was my first church web design project, I took a long look around the web at a great many church websites, both locally and regionally, to get a feel for some design ideas.  I seen some great sites for churches and more than a few that I felt could have been executed better, but there was nothing that particularly caught my attention.  I had absolutely no idea of where to even begin or where to go with this web development project at first; I was stuck and worst of all I knew it!

Not finding a church website that inspired me, I simply started working on the project to see which way it would take me.  I knew from previous experience working on mainly wedding-industry related websites that using a blog that was integrated with social media plugins was the ideal route to take.  So the church was set up with a new hosting account on the River Valley Hosting web server with their new domain name.  WordPress was installed and content was transferred to the site simply using the default design for the blog.

After several months of kicking design concepts around, I decided that a simple banner and navigation design would suffice, so I quickly made some design layout mockups of what I had in mind and ran it by the pastor and his wife – they loved it!  I then quickly took the design layout and converted it to a PHP, XHTML and CSS template and installed it to the WordPress templating system.  Once the overall design work was completed, there have been several updates to the site adding more content, the first several church sermons to create an ongoing podcast series uploaded and plugins have been added from Networked Blogs and Facebook.

The next phase of this project is continuing to add new content as the church gets it ready as well as coaching the Pastor and his wife and some of the congregation in adding content themselves or becoming contributors.  I am excited to see where the next few months takes us with this project!

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Coming soon there will also be a Facebook Fan widget on this site too.

The project really started coming together though with the professional assistance of Paulina Leyba at The Image Gallery.  She did an amazing job with shooting as well as editing a number of poses and backgrounds with Larry.  She then also provided the inside shot of an open magazine which was edited a bit further to accommodate the page content.  The combination of excellent studio work with expert Photoshop skills resulted in strong material used as the foundation for the actual site design work!

Once the foundation was laid, a design layout was created and forwarded to Larry for his approval.  After some minor changes with text position and font styles, we quickly came to an agreement on the finalized layout.  Once this stage of the process was reached, it was a simple matter of creating an image map in XHTML and CSS that allowed navigation to the other pages on the mini-site as well as to the other sites belonging to Larry.  It was also suggested to Larry that text links of all the image map links be placed at the bottom of the site for better search engine optimization.

With the “cover page” now completed, the rest of the site came together with ease as Larry provided much of the page content.  We did do some graphic design for the interior of the “magazine” by creating an ad-like contact banner located on each page.  In all, the actually web development project took less than two weeks from start to finish, when the site was put live as well as being promoted on Facebook.

Another point of interest with this design was the inclusion of a customized YouTube video that was reformatted to better fit the layout of the pages.  This in turn filled in one of the pages rather nicely, complimenting the rest of the design!

You may visit Larry’s newest site at: LarryWilliams.biz

Another greath thing about this project was implementing the ideas that Mitch had, which required coming up with some creative solutions that were not inside my toolbox of regular tricks.  For instance, one of the hurdles that we ran into was that of getting Flash animation to work properly with all of the other scripts that are used.  Also, because of the number of scripts used in the design, occasionally we ran into problems with the scripts themselves playing nice with each other.  Again this required thinking outside the box and coming up with several ingenius methods of creating the desired effects while not crashing the rest of the site or rendering other effects inoperable.

One such example would be that of the Flash slide show in the header of the main page.  The usual methods of embedding Flash into a website did not work because of the way that WordPress renders dynamic page URLs.  While there was no issue using the default method of creating page and post URLs, the SEO friendly method of rendering URLs left something to be desired using the traditional methods of embedding Flash into a web page.  After some experimentation over the course of a week, the best method seemed to be editing the PHP code of the WordPress template as well as some minor adjustments to the associated JScript.  The end result is the nice addition of a Flash animation that also uses XML to match much of the slide show content with the wording, controlling effects and so on.

Another area that had us stumped for some time was that of the rotating testimonials that appear just to the right of the “ACCOLADES:” heading.  Mitch wanted some form of animation that rotated through several glowing client testimonials that were also linked to corresponding posts within his blog.  I tried using the previous script that I developed to do just that, but it interfered with the other instances of animation that make heavy use of Scriptaculous in WordPress.  It left me scratching my head many times as I would go on to finish other aspects of the project after each abortive attempt to get the links/testimonials rotators to work with everything else.

The solution finially came to me late one night and I was so enthusiastic that I had to call Mitch to tell him about it!  After I reassured him that I was a genius several times, I went on to explain the rather simplistic solution that solved the entire problem.  Once that hurdle was cleared, the rest of the project was a cakewalk!

You may visit Mitch’s new site at: TayloredWeddings.com