The website(s) are going to be created using WordPress – something that I am already very familiar with, but now the aim is to become an absolute expert!

I have just finished reading ‘Smashing WordPress’ by Thord Daniel Hedengren – and it was very interesting. So now I am going to be trying out a lot of new techniques and I imagine this blog is going to fill up with countless posts dedicated to everything WordPress.

Wish me luck!

This is a new tattoo studio which needed an online presence. This site is powered by WordPress and I have used JavaScript to encorporate features that encourage the visitor to explore further. Check it out.
Visit the actual website >>>

This website serves a museum curator & freelance writer. It serves as both a blog & online portfolio with an attention grabbing front page loaded with JavaScript. The site is easily maintainablle using wordpress as a CMS. (The site is currently offline)

This is a small website for a building business offering a wide range of services. They needed a simple website just to get a presence on the internet. The website is built using wordpress as a CMS.
Visit the actual website >>>

This is the series of websites I looked after professionally for just over two years. They were created by One ltd, and although I did not make these websites I was solely responsible their maintenance and continued development until April 2011.
Visit the actual website >>>

I checked the php.ini file and the maximum file upload size was set to 2MB. Having changed this to 6MB (which was plenty big enough for the database in question) I tried again.
Same error message, so read a few forums and it seemed that this was going to be a bit of trouble to put right. Lots of people encounter this error and even with files that are lower than the limit set by the php.ini

So I used a different method to upload the database:

• While in phpMyAdmin, select the database that you want to import the data into from the left hand side.
• Then press the SQL button.
• In the pop up box paste in the contents of the sql file you want to upload.
• Press GO! (This actually took a while for my computer to process, so be patient)
• Job done!

All scripts are categorised and clearly labelled for browser compatibility etc.

Visit the Dynamic Drive website.

To do this I created a new file (contactbar.php) and called for it in the various templates: <?php get_contactbar(); ?>

I then had to define this function in the functions.php file within the template I had just created:

function get_contactbar( $name = null ) {

do_action( ‘get_contactbar’, $name );

$templates = array();
if ( isset($name) )
$templates[] = “contactbar-{$name}.php”;

$templates[] = “contactbar.php”;

if (” == locate_template($templates, true))
load_template( get_theme_root() . ‘/default/contactbar.php’);
}

Works perfectly.

The problem is that, using wordpress, the whole site shares the same navigation. This means it is difficult to mark an element as ‘active’ as it would always be active.

I found a simple (and some might say dirty) solution. I used a server side PHP conditional to every item in the navigation, setting the anchor element’s class to “active” if that’s the page we’re on:

<div id=”navigation”>

</div> <!– #navigation –>

The ‘a’ link would be marked as active on the correct page which then allows you to style it up however you like.

This solution does rely heavily on the URL in the browser, but I do not consider this an issue in this case.

Two potentially useful websites:
http://benlancaster.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/html-css-design-patterns/
http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=157

Below I will outline the basic process used to create the feed:

Essentially I take a video recording using a normal Sony hand held video camera and edit this using- PowerDirector.
I then export this file as an MPEG2 file and convert it to iPod format (MP4) using a free programme called Super.

In order for iTunes to be able to pick up your podcasts they need to be in a RSS feed. I use e-blogger as a place to list our new podcasts, as the title of the podcast can be the link to the video file (this was important for iTunes). The video files are hosted on Amazon S3 as it is a relatively cheap place to host videos.
I then use Feedburner to convert the e-blogger listing into a RSS feed that iTunes can read to create our podcasting feed.

This process is pretty cheap as most software, and websites used are actually free. The most expensive element to the process is the hosting – which can vary hugely depending on how many people use your feed.