As some of you know (check the bio), besides spending my time as a sysadmin, I also build websites for a venture I call Zeal Technologies. Its a business that I started with a college friend who was also a collegue of mine at Coastal Carolina while I worked there. Over the course of the past 5 years, I’d built a web framework that we used with almost every project we built, until about a year ago.
When I began my blog last year, I used WordPress. I had used it once before to build out a church website for my wife’s boss. I was really impressed with it and how it could be extended and themed really easy. So over the last year and half, I’ve implemented a few WordPress sites, mostly using themes other people had developed – like the one on this site and my personal site.
Over the last month, though, I have been working on a project for a friend of my wife and I – a business called Keeping the Green. Nicole has the idea of finding eco-friendly materials and marketing them under this label. I’ve helped her get some things together – like logo and some designs for printed items – but the website has been more of a challenge.
At the same time, my wife has been working on a business venture selling paintings on recycled windows. She too is using WordPress with a plugin called WP E-Commerce on her site. We picked a nice looking free template for her site, so no big deal there.
For Nicole, though, I really wanted to create a custom designed website template for WordPress. After eight or ten sites, I now understand better how the themes are created and its pretty straight forward. So, over the past few weeks, I have been tackling that, designing the site in Photoshop, working on cutting it and getting all the CSS worked out – I realy only want to build CSS sites from now on – and getting things together.
This week, I really hit a milestone. Number one, I found time to work on this again (and as you can tell from the blog, my schedule has finally freed up a little to have time to play). Number two, I took my sample design and I’ve split into a more standard WordPress theme configuration. And it worked! I have built the design side of my first WordPress theme. Its really early in the design phase and nothing is live (don’t try to buy anything just yet!), but take a gander at it. I’m pretty proud. Its still got a ways to go, but its there… And I’m excited!
