Well, yesterday evening was a sad day for the world as we marked the passing of Steve Jobs. I consider myself a huge Apple fan and own just about every product they make. I have been fascinated with Apple computers since the first time I worked on one. I saw a piece of hardware and [...]
I think the average consumer thinks most creative professionals have an endless supply of creativity at their disposal, but the truth is that creativity must be nurtured. Many times we just keep making withdrawals from our stash of creativity until we are burnt out, over worked, and looking for something else to do. But the [...]
Many of you might not know that I share an office space with 2 other amazing creatives (Jason Cohen Photography and Southern Fete Creative). It is an awesome relief to have people liked mind to rely on when the stresses of life and business come up. We enjoy this so much we wanted to share [...]
Saint Ann Catholic Church in Mamou, LA came to us with a goal of making a user friendly website that better matched the actual vitality of their parish. As with most Catholic web design, mass and confession times needed to be strongly present on the home page, but the pastor wanted to make sure to highlight new events happening in the parish as well. We setup a large image/content slide show on the home page of the site to draw attention to the most important events. We also integrated an online parish events calendar to help give users an update of all the things happening in the parish.
As far as design was concerned we attempted to pull from the heart of Mamou to showcase an area with rich tradition and color. Saint Ann is an older and more traditional Catholic church with a strong Cajun congregation. Our use of color was to provide a sense of depth and a feeling of an ancient connection to the past. We also creatively directed a photo shoot with Jamie Orillion Photography and Design to bring a updated look to the front of the church as well as to develop a collection of stock images for the parish to use throughout the site. Cruce also coordinated the branding of their new logo and identity. Their logo draws from their very recognizable steeple. Our goal was to provide Saint Ann with a solid identity to use in future print media.
See more of their site here: www.saintannmamou.org
As we noted last week with the launch of WordPress there are a few simple little interface tweaks that make it lighter and faster.
We are now offering with all new projects free 30 day access to our extensive video training series (see screenshot below). The video library is kept updated automatically when versions or features change. We also include special video tutorials for site specific features or plugins. As an added bonus we include a written manual for the non-visual learners out there. If you are interested please send us an email and we will be happy to add the feature on to your site for a free trial period. As always with every website project we still provide our personal and in-depth training before site launch.
Thanks,
Daniel Kedinger, Owner/Lead Geek
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Not many updates to WordPress have gotten me so excited as the most recent version. WordPress 3 has really amped up the CMS factor with many new features that previously were achieved with 3rd party plugins. Most of the functionality that I added onto my client’s websites are now built directly into the core of the system. I have been working on a few new sites that are close to launch that are built from the ground up with WordPress 3. There are over 1,217 bug fixes and feature improvements, I will spare you all the geekery and only highlight a few here.
This feature expands upon the standard “post types” of posts, pages, and attachments. It gives users the ability to create a new section to categorize data. When this feature is implemented into a website it can really be tweaked to what ever dataset that needs to be displayed. The main examples used by WordPress to explain the functionality are things like a real estate listings, a podcast directory, or a book/movie database. But really you could do anything with custom post types. For instance you could use it to display store locations with address information, descriptions and more.
This is a feature that I have included in many websites with the use plugins for quite a few years now, but it is finally a part of the core system. This allows users to create and modify their menu systems on the fly. If you want to have categories in the menu as well as pages you just drag and drop and you are good to go. It also allows the ability to make links that can point to other locations. This helps free up the need to create dummy pages with redirects.
Previously this feature was known as WordPress MU, but it as well as been integrated directly into the system. WordPress 3 now lets you very easily manage multiple WordPress sites with one install. Another feature that when used correctly can be very useful. For instance a shopping complex that has one main website with multiple sub sites for each individual business, allowing individual control to all the users for their own site, but still connected and hosted in one location.
There are countless features and many security fixes, way too many to note here. But they also did many little interface tweaks that help make things less cluttered and easier to just get in and write. If you host your site yourself make sure to update, you will be happy. As always we are ready to go with WordPress 3 and have already been playing in the sandbox with it for quite a few months. You can get more information on the new features here and for the geeks amongst us more details here.
