I have been looking for a way to reinvent my own personal blog, Mommy Geekology 2.0, and I finally settled on wanting something that was more of a lifestream – I wanted to highlight the fact that I am active on Facebook, Twitter, that I write for Girl Talk Thursday and also own and operate Rent a Geek Mom and Headway Beginner. I also wanted to bring in my Flickr stream and start a microblog so that I could share little bits and pieces without feeling obligated to write a full-blown blog post.

Read more about the design on my site.

The second site that Christina needed designed was her personal website – which serves as something of an online portfolio and professional blog. I slightly modified the design from the first site to give it a bit more flair and a totally different look – in Headway, just a few clicks and a couple of lines of CSS!

I think it looks pretty sharp! Check out Christina Chitwood Performance to see what she’s all about and look at the design more closely.

Christina had invested in the Headway Theme – her mother uses it on her website! – and loved it, but needed some help from me to get her site up quickly and looking great – in fact, she needed two websites up in 10 days, including new logos and promotional graphics.

The great thing about Headway is that I was able to build the first site, export the customizations – not the leafs (that’s coming in Headway 1.7!), but colors & CSS – and use it as the a base for the second design. This cut design time way down for the second site!

This is the first website – Fit Body Full Life. The first post is featured, and the posts after that are excerpts. The site looks best when a square featured image is used, and a custom excerpt written.

It’s not being used, but there is space for an advertisement in the header, and we also installed a sitemap plugin to output a nice-looking and easy to navigate sitemap. Note links to the sitemap, privacy policy and more in the footer, which I compressed down to one line.

The Headway Beginner website was designed with new users in mind – they want to get in, get the information they are looking for and get out! A simple, clean design with clear category listings and visual clues to highlight important information was born.

Built on the Headway Theme, naturally. I use a number of tricks on this site, including a search bar integrated into the navigation, social media icons on the left side of the page, an email subscription box in the header and a Featured Content Gallery. Also integrated are glossary and category icon plugins to improve the overall user experience.

The folks at the Newcombe Estate and Country Club wanted to update their difficult to manage HTML-based website and take advantage of the ease of WordPress and the Headway theme together. There are several page templates, integration with the NextGen Gallery, and a number of great features for the client, including a customizable “Welcome” box for visitors as well as quick contact forms (and notifications) and the ability o easily change out the three images that appear in the header, to keep things fresh and updated.

The folks at Newcombe Estate and Country Club were particularly excited about the SEO advantages that Headway and WordPress together have to offer.

This site is a great example of how WordPress and Headway can work together to provide a great business website.

Kami, blog author at The Fence: A Working Mom’s Blog, was looking to migrate away from her old Blogger site and enter the brave new world of WordPress, self hosted. Yay!

We used the Headway Theme on this site, and took advantage of the Cufon plugin, a widgetized footer, and some custom CSS to place the navigation overlapping the header.

The newest beta version of Headway 1.7 has been released to the lucky ones holding a developers license, and geeks, web designers and WordPress newbies around the world are clapping their hands with glee and squealing with joy like kids at Christmas.

This next version is the bomb, guys.

New Features include:

• Quick Start Wizard, which prompts you to choose how many columns (COLUMNS! YES!), upload an image, and even reads your image to suggest a color palette to get started.
• Exporting leaf templates, creating your own Styles and managing/editing styles from the Visual Editor
• Overhaul of the Content Leaf for more stability
• Ability to “center” leafs
• Easily manage global padding and margins on leafs
• Search bar integrated into navigation automatically
• RSS link in header if you want it there
• “Top” and “Bottom” leaf areas

… and more. I can’t list all the options.

The Headway team is also working on a complete overhaul of the documentation; it’s traditionally been a weak point with this theme, but that’s all going to change. Myself, the developer and a couple of other power users will be writing up documentation, tutorials, recording videos and more in time for the official public launch of the stable version. See my post over at Headway Beginner to leave your recommendations, questions or comments about the newest version!

When Amber and Laura of Legal Marketing Maven approached me looking to switch from Thesis to Headway, I won’t lie; I was excited. They wanted a clean design with the flexibility of Headway – and that’s about all the guidance I got

Not that I’m complaining – I loved having a chance to come up with something on my own. Either they’re really easy to please or I hit the nail on the head, because they approved my first mockup immediately.

Less than 4 days later, the site was launched with the new design. From PSD to live in four days – and I only work nights! Headway never ceases to amaze me in it’s flexibility.

So what did it take?

• Separate home and blog pages
• Integration of the Featured Content Gallery
• Custom posts query to feature the latest post in four different categories
• 3 page templates
• Rotating ad plugin to rotate (upon refresh) testimonials in the footer
• Paul Coughlin’s Widgetized Footer for Headway tutorial
• WP-Cufon plugin for custom font generation
• A bunch of awesome CSS

* Logo design by a third party. Social media icons designed by me, based off of the original logo, obviously. All other graphics provided by Rent a Geek Mom.

It’s official! The Headway Beginner site has launched, with several tutorials already up for you to look through. I have a few more scheduled over the next few days, and I’m busy cranking out as much user-friendly and beginner-friendly Headway knowledge as I can.

What are you waiting for? Go check it out!

It’s well known by designers that Internet Explorer is the scourge of the web. It doesn’t render CSS and HTML the way that we expect it to, and as a result you’ll find thousands upon thousands of hits if you search for “CSS for IE” on Google.

Headway does a pretty good job of being optimized for IE, considering the vast number of user options that are configurable. That said, there are definitely things that you may want to address, or need to address, depending on how your site is set up, or what custom CSS you may want to implement. For example, some users are sometimes experiencing issues with Navigation submenus not lining up properly in IE only. Other users will get a code snippet from the forums to add a background image to certain elements or insert a search box into the navigation bar, only to find that the code they are using isn’t optimized for IE7, and needs to be tweaked.

Luckily, Headway offers you recourse if you know, or can find someone who knows, a little CSS. In the custom.css file (either under Appearance –> Edit, or via FTP in headway-XX/custom.css (where XX is the theme version), you’ll see some comments:

/*
To get started customizing with CSS, we recommend you
go to http://headwaythemes.com/documentation/customizing-your-headway-site/custom-css/
to get started.
When writing the selectors for the elements, put body.custom at the
beginning.
For an example on how to change the background with custom CSS
we can use the following code.
body.custom {
background: red;
}
*/

This is just some text about use of the custom.css file, and you can ignore it (aside from looking at the documentation, as that is always a good idea!). You do want to make sure that you add your custom code below the closing */, otherwise your code will be “commented out” and not utilized by the browser.

Now, for example — let’s say you followed a tutorial online and managed to get a custom search box in your navigation bar. Unfortunately, in IE it’s not showing up properly — it’s perhaps it’s showing just a little lower than it should and not lining up properly with other elements. You can target just IE by using a special class in your CSS:

body.custom.ie div#mysearchbox {
margin-top: -10px;}

It might not be all of IE, though. Each version renders CSS and HTML a little differently (FUN) and maybe your issue is only in the dreaded Internet Explorer 6 [insert Hollywood movie thriller noises here]. You can target just IE6, too. Even better -what if the IE fix isn’t enough for IE6,and IE6 needs just a little more help getting this looking better? You can add a second statement below the first to target IE6:

body.custom.ie6 div#mysearchbox {
margin-top: -10px;
margin-left: 2px;} 

If that is the only custom.css you have, then your custom.css file would look something like this after you save, and hopefully that out of line element in IE is fixed.

/*
To get started customizing with CSS, we recommend you
go to http://headwaythemes.com/documentation/customizing-your-headway-site/custom-css/
to get started.
When writing the selectors for the elements, put body.custom at the
beginning.
For an example on how to change the background with custom CSS
we can use the following code.
body.custom {
background: red;
}
*/
body.custom.ie div#mysearchbox {
margin-top: -10px;}
body.custom.ie6 div#mysearchbox {
margin-top: -10px;
margin-left: 2px;} 

If you can do it in CSS, you can use the specific IE classes in Headway to target IE. It’s not only IE, or IE6 — as you would imagine, you can substitute body.custom.ie6 for body.custom.ie7 and body.custom.ie8 as well.