Enlightened vending (here’s their new site) needed a site fast to promote their company that specializes in tasty, healthy snacks. They wanted a site that “POPPED” and a sunny logo that would express warmth and charity since a percentage of the profits from their nutritious snacks goes to good causes.

WordPress is once again the CMS of choice to allow for easy edits and fast search engine indexing. Rather than starting a theme from scratch to save time and money they went for a modified Blixed theme.

They already had hosting and a domain name so they passed me the details and I went ahead and installed the latest version of WordPress, a template and configured several key plug-ins (including a Contact Form script, Akismet anti-spam, & google XML site map creator). Then I went about modifying the colors and other elements.

I also created the graphic elements such as the vending machine “buttons” which should be there until they have their own images to upload. The turnaround for the entire site was just three days. If you want a quality website and need it fast, get in touch and let’s make it happen!

SIT 2007 is using a photo of mine from Tequila for their CD-ROM cover. It’s available at all good Mexican Academic Libraries

Here’s the original.

There are many reasons why a WordPress site is better for you than a traditional static site. The main ones being:

• You don’t have to call up your web person every time you want to make edits to the content
• Super easy to upload photos, videos, music, documents, etc…
• It’s optimized for search engines from the get go.
• Add and remove pages easily from the admin panel and the links take care of themselves
• Ready-to-go communication system via comments and RSS
• Thousands of plug-ins to enhance the site’s functionality

Although WordPress is well known as a blogging platform, you don’t have to include a blog section in your site, it can be purely undated pages. Virtual Impax just published an informative and informal little post about whether a blog is a good idea for your business too.

I just made a small site with relatively few pages based on a free template. It’s for The Other Café- a SF comedy club’s page for an upcoming reunion. It features a gallery, submission forms and a fair few custom graphics. As articles are submitted it will grow and is now ranked #1 on Google after a few short weeks for the search terms: (The) Other Cafe, a testiment to WordPress’s impressive in-built SEO.

I just read an excellent article that explains what the various options are for your website and also has good definitions of terms like CMS, Platform and pros and cons of various approaches.

Click on over there, then come back and if you have any questions.

As you’ve probably gathered I’m very much into photography. I upload most of my photos to Flickr, but I wanted a site to showcase my favourites. Presenting www.agaveweb.com/photos !

It uses a theme called Monochrome Gallery and uses custom fields to display the photos and thumbnails. Notable features for this site included:

• Making the RSS feed include those custom fields.
• The E-card section where I adapted a send-to-a-friend plugin to fit a photoblog.
• Minor tweaks here and there to the layout.

Overall, it’s a great theme which didn’t require much in the way of adaptation and I LOVE the javascript image gallery on the front page. There are also pro (paid for) versions of the theme which have lots more configuration possibilities through the admin panel.

Check it out and leave a comment if you either there or here if you want to know more about the ins and outs of photoblogging.

Here are some I designed for a nifty little gadget - a powerful LED flashlight that recharges in your car’s cigarette lighter… If you’re interested in buying a lighter, try lighterlight.com. If you’d like me to design some web ad banners for you in a range of sizes, call me or shoot me an email!

My latest site has involved working very closely with the site’s executive producer who has very clear ideas on visuals and organization. Here’s a screen grab of how it USED to look on the right.

This time for a less academic reason… I was contacted by someone who had seen my pictures of Tequila, Mexico with a view to using them on their site. As development on the site progressed, they needed someone local to take high resolution pictures of the bottles on a white background for use on the site and in marketing materials and large tracts of text translated from Spanish to English. Happily, I’m a one-stop shop for web design, photography and translation.

My photos are free to use for non-commercial purposes. However, if you are interested in commercial use get in touch and make an offer. A series of photos I took of the peanut harvest in Jalisco, Mexico is going to be used in an upcoming book on Mexican Geography published and sold in Mexico.