Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category


Small town newspapers can have a great web presence

Monday, December 21st, 2009

There is a high probability that what’s contained in this post will be conceived as another old media versus new media argument over who’s better than who or which one will die out first. That’s not my intention, even if does point out a newspaper’s website presence.

Basically, it boils down to this; I want information on what’s going on in the small town of where I grew up in Iowa. My only option? The local newspaper that has been operating their print publication since 1879.

What’s the point of online presence if you don’t do it well?

The newspaper in question does have a website, but it’s highly outdated in terms of how it is constructed and updated. In fact, the basic foundation is something I helped to create in the mid-90′s when my parents owned and operated a website business during that time, giving me my first, professional gigs that have transformed into the sixty4media projects of today.
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A new design to johnbollwitt.com

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

johnbollwitt.com v2.0

I’ve reworked the design to my website to challenge my limits in terms of web design. It’s taken me about a month or so to get the overall concept down, but it was time to do something different in order to push my boundaries with what I know and am comfortable with. The various sixty4media projects that we’ve been working on has made me think about this a lot, and a recent project for my day job saw me take the website for one of the radio stations I work for, The Beat 94.5, to a temporary overhaul into a complete WordPress site.

DSC_0089
Photo credit: stu_dio on Flickr

The basic inspiration for this design was a hot afternoon while drinking a Vitamin Water, something that I’ve become a fan of over the past year. Looking at their label, I found myself admiring the simplicity of the design to market their product. When it comes down to it, it’s just text and colors. No fancy graphic logo or mascots. Text was the only thing selling their product, so I found some inspiration in that.

For the most part, this effort was one of design over function. I’ve asked for opinions of some folks that I really respect and taken their feedback, which should never be overlooked. I tried to incorporate how other people felt when they saw it but then tried to one up the recommendation in order to push the personal challenge ever more.

If you find problems with the site, be sure to let me know. Any good web designer will tell you that any project, especially something to do with your own site, is constantly in development. You’re truly never satisfied.

Adding WPtouch to my WordPress site

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Hot on the heels of today’s WordCampSF 2009, a recent survey on Twitter by Matt Mullenweg showed that two of BraveNewCode’s plugins for WordPress took number three and one.

WordTwit is something I’ve been using for some time now, and it’s a must have add-on that automatically posts updates to Twitter when you publish a post. Version 2.0 has brought on some great improvements that keep the plugin simple yet very powerful.

wptouch Taking number one is WPtouch, a plugin that makes your WordPress site optimized for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android mobile devices. It’s been available for some time now, and I’ve been very slow to getting it installed onto my site. Call it being lazy because it’s a very quick and easy process to upload it to your WordPress installation, activate it, and you’re done.

Dale and Duane are consistently working on improvements to the WPtouch infrastructure, making it better and better with each release. Keep your eyes on their blog to get the latest news on what’s next.

Crusing along at WordCampSF 2009

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

WordCampSF 2009

After a GPS and Google Maps adventure of helping our taxi driver get to the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, it’s been a jam packed morning at WordCampSF 2009. And actually, it’s been very relaxed and chilled in terms of the sessions so far today.

WordCampSF 2009

Andy Peatling gave a great session on BuddyPress, Matt Cutts from Google had a variety of great insights when it comes to SEO and your WordPress site, and the “State of the Word” by none other than Matt Mullenweg himself was great. I learned a lot about the history of this CMS, and the future looks really promising for WordPress on multiple fronts. It’s one of those days that makes you excited to be a developer and gets those ideas cranked up in your head.

There have been a variety of great announcements that are going around the circles, and I can’t even recall them all. It’ll take a little while for me to digest them all and give my insights to later, but a lot of what I’ve seen today make our projects with sixty4media clients look even more exciting when it comes to current and future endeavors.

Needless to say, there is a lot more to check out today. The afternoon sessions are getting ready to kick off, and I have my time at the Genius Bar at 4:55PM to 5:45PM. If the morning has been any preview, the rest of the day should be pretty kick ass.

In San Francisco for WordCampSF 2009

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Street Cars

I’m in San Francisco this weekend for WordCampSF, the WordPress conference that is organized by the creators of this platform that we use pretty much exclusively with our sixty4media projects. This will be a chance to meet new people and find out new things that I can use in my bag of tricks for future development with my WordPress endeavors. There is also the opportunity to share some of the ideas and concepts I use with others in order to give back to the community.

I’ve been asked to spend some time at the Genius Bar in the afternoon where people will be able to come up and ask WordPress related questions. I’m thrilled to be asked to do this, but my only hope is that I can live up to that “genius” tag as much as possible.

Rebecca is along for the trip as well as our pal Duane. John Biehler is in route today, and Dale Mugford will join us later today to bring the BraveNewCode crew in full attendance.

With hope, I’ll do my best to get some good photos and writing in this trip because of the recent upgrade of a MacBook Pro to our sixty4media arsenal. Many thanks to the guys from Simply Computing in Vancouver for their help with getting me this great piece of hardware. It will come in handy for sure, especially on this trip!