NTice Blog » Web Development

Version 2.5 of Wordpress

Nathan — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:04:24 +0000

Wordpress released version 2.5 yesterday and some of the new features are great. Along with a new look my favorite new feature is the one click autoupdate plugin feature. This should save webmasters time especially ones who have many wordpress sites to upgrade. It looks like all of the investment money that has been sent to the wordpress developers recently has really been paying off. If you have never used wordpress it is time to start. There have been over 1.9 million downloads of wordpress so far this year. With wordpress you can have a brand new site up and working in a matter of minutes and oncethe site is setup, adding new articles is as simple as sending an email. Open source development has helped produce one of the best content management tools with wordpress.

Aesthetics and Functionality

Nathan — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 04:52:52 +0000

When given a choice I prefer to work on functional issues instead of aesthetic ones. I trained for a few years to be an architect and learned quite a bit about aesthetics and design. I also learned enough to know I would make a much better engineer than an artist. Developing functionality in software and web design is often much more enjoyable to me than making aesthetic choices because you know when you built it right, it works. Often when I am working on a project I’ll field questions from my clients about Aesthetic choices. Why did you choose this color or place the ad in that place on my website? These questions have no real answer as the old adage goes beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Now there are some basic design principles that every designer should apply but once you get beyond that your design will either be approved or shot down strickly based on your clients opinion of what looks good to them. After all it is their business, product, service, etc and you are building their public face on the internet. The best advice I can give is design before you build and once the design is approved make sure your clients know changes can be expensive.

Website Hosting Questions

Nathan — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:42:22 +0000

Where should I host my website? People ask me about website and email hosting all of the time and I usually tell them that I can host it for them. When you need to host your own site I would recommend using 1and1.com. I have used several hosting providers over the last 10 years, too many to name here. Most hosting providers are really just resellers of someone elses hosting product and that gives them very little control when there are problems with service. 1 and 1 has both linux and microsoft hosting platforms from 1 site shared hosting up to a dedicated server. Prices start at around $3 per month for shared hosting accounts and that includes free domain name registration. One of the big issues I have with most hosting providers is their support after the sale is terrible, not so with 1and1. If you are interested in hosting your website, email, or just registering a domain name try 1 and 1 and you won’t be disappointed.

Military Web Sites Redesigned

Nathan — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:00:02 +0000

We recently finished rebuilding serveral military websites for national direct marketing based in Atlanta. During the first phase of the project we are implementing a total site redesign for 10 of the major websites in the National Direct Marketing web ring. We used wordpress as a content management tool to allow NDMS to more easily make changed to their major sites with little or no programmer intervention. The sites were also made more search engine friendly and new content was added. Some of the sites we rebuilt were usnavy.com, navy.org, army.net, airforce.net, militarypay.org, soldier.net and several others. In December we are planning to add new content and continue updating the NDMS military web ring.

Better Animals Show Series Website

Nathan — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:27:20 +0000

I work alot with a graphic design company in St. Louis and they are great. They send me new and interesting projects quite often and here is a great example. The website BetterAnimalsShowSeries.com is a site we built about a year ago and have been gradually adding too since then. This site was built for Land O’ Lakes and has everything we could budget into it. The site has podcasts, great custom administration tools, databases of user and contest winners, user generated content, and great advertising etc. This project was so well done the client wanted to convert many of their other sites to a similar format or just fold them into this site.