Web Design by Sheriar Designs: Impeccable Code | Beautiful Design

I just couldn’t resist … four was not enough … I’m addicted … I just had to make one more …

Zen Garden Entry Number Five: Saturated Glow

The Inspiration

As you may have seen I recently blogged about the completion of one of my latest sites, Rose Edge LLC. While the client and I are both extremely pleased with how the site turned out, it wasn’t exactly what I originally had in mind.

I ran into an annoying little problem last week - Adium was no longer able to connect with my AIM account. The error it kept giving me was “Adium problem - Error: Socket is not connected.” Frustrating!

After hunting around the web a bit and finding several headache-inducing solutions (involving deleting, uninstalling, reinstalling, etc), I found a forum comment that I thought worth a try.

Wrapping up my Wordpress kick (for now), I recently did another custom wordpress theme job where I was asked to add breadcrumbs. I didn’t know how to do this and so spent a good amount of time researching. Turns out there are a few plugins out there which will do the trick, but the one that worked best for me was …

Another challenge I had when creating the Wordpress theme for Rose Edge LLC was that I needed to create a couple of custom includes, and I didn’t know how to do that. I needed a space on the sidebar where Kristin could update her Upcoming Event area. I didn’t want to have to teach her how to go into the backend code and edit sidebar.php. Next I needed a way for her to edit the “Insight Flash” that appears on her home page. I had already found a way to use the Excerpt as a secondary source of content - I needed another solution.

I am by no means a Wordpress expert, but I do use it for this site and I have built a few custom themes for others. Recently I came across an interesting problem while creating the Wordpress theme for Rose Edge LLC: I needed to have two separate content areas and Wordpress only provides one. If you look at the design, I needed my client to be able to control the content in the “highlight box” (the green box at the top) and the “content area” (the blue box below). These could not be part of the same post info because of all the code that is in between them (which defines the visual break between the two. I didn’t want my client to have to insert code into the middle of every post. What to do?

It occurred to me that Wordpress already has two ways to pull in content: The Post (called in your template with <?php the_content(); ?>) and The Excerpt (called in your template with <?php the_excerpt(); ?>). Since my client wasn’t using Wordpress as a blog, but rather as a CMS, she wasn’t using The Excerpt at all. Could she use it instead as a secondary content area? Well, yes … but not without some plugins and modifications.

For my first installment of “I discover, you discover” this one is hot off the presses of about an hour ago.

OK, so it’s a small annoyance but one that irks me nonetheless. Whenever I go to open a .psd file I always have to right-click and then choose “Open With” and then choose Photoshop. I’d simply prefer to have .psd files always open in Photoshop. I poked around a bit and figured out how to do it.

Well, if there’s anyone left lurking around here I’m sure you’ve noticed that this blog has been all but dead for the past year (6 posts in a year … lame). But I’ve been busy! I’ve had a lot of work, I bought my first house, I’ve been acting (community theater), dancing (salsa!), singing (joined a chorus), and of course there’s my family … life has been full and wonderful! But I missed the blog.

So I’ve been gearing up to get back to it for a while now but it seems like since the inception of Sheriar Designs the blogs about web design have increased exponentially almost daily. With the plethora of awesome information out there and limited free time on my part, I felt a bit constrained by the format I had set out for myself years ago - that I would distinguish myself by writing in-depth articles about my processes. Those were some seriously time-consuming articles!

So I kept my desire to return percolating and an idea emerged.

I just completed the design and development of Rose Edge LLC for Kristin Rose, who does motivational speaking, healing, and coaching.