Category: WordPress

I like WordPress.

I Charge For My Time,Design Work & Support (Not For WordPress)

Long before I understood GPL & before WordPress decided to yank over 200 non GPL-compatible themes from its Theme Viewer, I struggled with the seeming hypocrisy of charging $ for a theme when what you were really selling was WordPress, itself. Lets get real. Nothing I design to be used with WordPress could be more than static html pages without WordPress. Without WordPress I would have to write my own CMS and database queries and PHP code which I don’t know how to do. Without WordPress it might take me up to 6 months to make a dynamic website. Even then I would have to practically live at PHP Classes and SourceForge. It would be slow and painful. Why? Because I am not a programmer. I am a designer. And I know very well how the 2 things are not the same thing. Lets just say I have been down that road and the results as well as the experience were not that nice.

If YOU SELL YOUR THEMES AREN’T YOU ALSO SELLING WORDPRESS?
If I wanted to I could act as if I was the one making the client’s website so awesome. I never did act this way. I steered clear of any ethical monkey business, I felt, by making it very clear to my clients they were paying me for design and the limitless, call me on my personal cell phone Sunday night at 12 midnight kind of support I provide not for the CMS powering their websites.

CASE STUDY
A woman contacted me asking for a custom theme for her already set up WordPress powered site/blog. She had been given a comprehensive list of instructions and actions to follow on how to get a WP site up and running and she had followed them successfully. What she was stuck on was how to get a better theme. She’d seen the free themes available and she know she could install them directly to her server just by downloading them from the built in theme viewer and clicking activate. What she didn’t have was a theme designed just for her using her logo, her font-choices & colors and her desire to have a fully fluid width website. And when it came to knowing about plugins, well lets just say her list had not included anything about plugins.

When she paid me she paid me for what I know about WordPress and my design made expressly for her website.
The end results made her very happy. She not only got a website that doesn’t look like “just another WordPress blog” she got a website that doesn’t look that much like other websites. And if I have learned anything doing this job people want a unique looking website. Because she had already installed WordPress she know she was not paying me for WordPress! She knew what was available on the WordPress Theme Viewer and she knew that what she ended up with was not available on the WordPress Theme Viewer!

BUT THIS IS A BUSINESS! IF I CAN’T SELL THEMES WHAT CAN I SELL?
Well, actually I could sell my themes. I could pack them into a zip file and sell them using PayPal. There is nothing stopping me from doing this. Because not a single theme of mine is in the WordPress Theme Viewer and my business does not depend on luring people to my other “Premium” (Paid) themes using a free theme as bait.

WHAT I GET PAID TO DO
When I get a new customer we work together on developing the feel of the design which I then create.I train them how to use the site. I also perform upgrades and updates and maintenance. If they have the willingness to learn how to use WordPress I don’t have to do updates for them at all. Depending on how complicated the theme is to use (I strive to keep it simple) most times everything just depends on using the right category to publish posts.

WHAT THEY GET FOR THE $$$$

  • A Unique Design
  • Support
  • Maintenance
  • A unique design speaks for itself.
  • Support can mean anything from design refreshing to SEO to fixing a page for them when they don’t close a list tag.
  • Maintenance can mean anything from setting up a cron job to stop their Apple Mail.app from flooding the Process Manager with never ending IMAP processes thereby taking down their website every hour on the hour (true story) to transferring their database and files to a new host.
  • I code by hand, no templates pre packaged and re sold here. Consequently nothing I code was churned out by Dream Weaver.

CAVEATS
I hate working on IIS.
I hate TABLES FOR LAYOUT
I will NAG you to Update your Website!

Still Get HTTP Errors When Uploading Pics To Your WordPress Posts or Pages?

The HTTP error may be fixed for most WP users but *most* people making their install open to those who have a valid password that is protected by .htaccess & htpasswd can not use the flash based uploader. I say most because maybe it’s just me and like 2 other people.

The Flexible Upload Plugin (valid up to wp-2.5.1) lets you upload more than one pic at a time. Yay! But just like your relationship status in Facebook, it’s complicated.

Long and Boring and Interesting only to Me Case History:
Once or twice a week I update a private subscription-based member’s only website. It’s a little bit of creativity mixed in with a whole lotta data entry.But who is complaining? It’s a paycheck and you know you need a steady one.

I sputtered along using blasted Cutenews for about a year because that was the CMS in place when I got the job. Updating the member’s site was l a b o r i o u s l y p a i n f u l .

I had to download and crop photos uniformly to fit in a badly designed tables for layout template, then re upload with ftp and link manually. What a pain! There was a lot of back content in the untransferrable CN but I screwed up my courage and switched to WordPress as a CMS and built my own theme. Then I one by one re created new WP Posts for each old CuteNews Post. UGH. I was looking for something that let you transfer data from CN to WP but the one thing that did skipped linkage and images and so what the hell good was that?

At least I did not have to see all those tables anymore,right? Posting became faster but it was still not as fast as it could be. There was great room for improvement to say the least. I really needed to able to upload multiple images to a post and resize them at the same time. Being able to do this would cut my posting time considerably.

Then came WP 2.5.1. There were a few problems: the files restricting access to the member’s site also blocked the flash uploader which was first introduced in 2.5.1 and allowed multiple image uploads. So close but yet so far. Then I found Flexible Upload which allowed me to upload multiple images and resize them at the same time. Along with Vincent Pratt’s Post Templates, updating the site became much faster and more efficient. The joy was temporary: soon after I found the solution, WordPress released quite a few new versions but the author of Flexible Upload dropped the project.

The plugin became depreciated but I stayed with 2.5.1 just to keep using it although I worried that staying with an older version of WordPress would make the member’s site vulnerable. So I finally upgraded to 2.7.1 a few days ago.

Well I’ll Just Find a Plugin That Replaces Flexible Upload. OOPS, There Isn’t One.
I’d done some research prior and I’d seen WordPress.org forum support topics recommending using Scissors instead of Flexible Upload and Faster Image,too. Unfortunately these 2 plugins stilluse the flash uploader which I simply cannot use.Very few people seem to protect or privatize their WordPress installs or at least if there are a lot of people doing it they are not going to the forum to get their problems sorted. None of the fixes in the wordpress.org forum could help me get around this problem. I was stuck. I could either disable the privacy file each time I made a new post (and leave tasty private content open to the general public-do you want me to get fired?) or use the Browser Uploader (super slow!) or use NextGen Gallery. While this is a good option because you can use ftp to upload multiple images- each post would use a unique gallery. 10 new posts a week. 10 new galleries a week. Ugh.

WordPress Gallery or NextGen Gallery?
The native WordPress gallery will automatically associate groups of images to the post – nextGen galleries have to be created, images have to be uploaded and then galleries can be inserted in the post. While it is a good option for anyone not having use of the flash uploader- it added 4 more steps to my streamlined posting routine. I’d gotten it down to a zippy little science and spoiled myself.

Faster Image Insert and Scissors,Maybe?
For the hell of it I installed Faster Image Insert and Scissors and left Flexible Upload activated and I decided to try making new post with all these plugins installed. To my surprise even though there was a nasty php error message printed in the editing page, Flexible Upload still let me upload images. Scissors let me resize them and my Media Settings took care of the rest. Long story short, you can use this plugin with 2.7.1 if you cannot use the flash uploader due to the privacy settings in your .htaccess file or whatever. The options/configurations for Flexible Upload don’t seem to be functional and the php error is ugly & the uploaded images show up in a very wonky way. Take a look:

Here is a fix to get rid of the error message in the post editing page scroll to bottom of the thread . Your settings for the Flexible Upload options page will still be ignored but the uploaded image wonkiness will be gone. Pretty cool! I should state again that Flexible Upload “takes over” the Faster Image Insert area in the post edit page.

New Website: Closet Space

picture-6The first first is a chance to design a movie trailer web site for a friend of mine, Sheru Arora (I did his main site askarora.com). I have always wanted to do one and best of it it’s a Horror flick. My favorite genre these days. I’m not sure what is is, a ghost story or a monster story or both. But it looks exciting and scary. It’s called Closet Space and is sure to scare the pants off of you. I know I used to be afriad of the closet.Especially after seeing Poltergeist as a kid. Parents be warned it’s probably going to cause trauma in small chirrens.

This is a fluid width site which means I did not use #page{width:980px}. Main divs are using percents. I started doing this for my main content div and my sidebar div on other websites but never for a wrapper. The big reason I wanted to try this is because I now have a widescreen monitor. That’s basically it. I’m really not involved in the fluid vs. fixed debate.

The screenshot shows the background image, the trailer playing in the ProPlayer Plugin for WordPress, and the Closet Space banner. I was given a still image from the trailer to work with as the background image. It did not look right “as was” so I grunged it up in Photoshop with some grunge brushes I got from Deviant Art which, by the way is my number one Photoshop Resource destination.

The banner logo is made up of 5 or 6 text layers all set to Overlay and using the blend option Outside Glow. The more text layers, the brighter the glow got. The font face is Baskerville.

Upgraayyeded

My personal site is now powered by WordPress 2.7 and I waited only a week this time to upgrade. The siren song of all the amazing new features promised in 2.7 was too tantalizing to ignore. I am not going to go on and on about how different it is and what I like and don’t like because that’s been covered many times already in many other blogs.
I’m not that worried about my clients; whether or not they will get shock from the new admin (which is now all sleek,slinky and silvery ) because I booted them up to 2.5 with out a warning and they did not freak out then. Although because it is such a change I feel some sort of warning is in order.But I do like it.I think it is going to help my clients find things faster and I won’t have to send them direct links anymore-maybe.
Possibly the best new feature is the ability to make a post “sticky” from the also new Quick Edit option in Posts-Edit.Plain awesome.
I find the easiest way to upgrade is to turn off all my plugins and delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folders and all the wordpress root files except wp-config.php and index.php and of course .htaccess.Then upload the new folders and files and upgrade the database and then re activate all the plugins.I have only had problems uploading with ftp(timeouts with large files and images) but that has never killed any site.It’s just a pain in the butt.Thankfully once all my sites are using 2.7 when there are new versions I can click upgrade and be done with it.Although it must still have to be done with ftp at least I won’t have to deactivate,delete and re upload and reactivate.Doing that for more than 10 sites is not something I look forward to.