I finished up a new website this weekend. I’m quite proud of this one. This was my first project with professionally-written copy and it makes a huge difference in the overall quality.

The site was built using WordPress (of course), and the theme (East Baisley, get it? it’s a portmanteau of East Bay and paisley…) uses custom fields for taglines and sidebar colors.

I designed a WordPress site for Will Boyd’s campaign for senate. It was a fun process. Learned a smidge about PHP and integrated Chris Coyier’s AnythingSlider. I realize I could’ve used a lighter slider, but I don’t know enough about jQuery to make many changes to appearance, and I couldn’t find a different one that I liked. I also used custom fields for the first time outside of experimentation.

This is much cleaner and hopefully much more appealing to the masses than my old one, while still retaining some of my own interest.

I “wrote my own code” for the contact form. I really just followed a basic tutorial and made some slight modifications… I don’t even remember what the mods were, it was a while back (my convenience store job saps the life out of me). I’m fairly certain I’ll want to redo it in the near future since it doesn’t provide much help to the user who doesn’t fare well with technology.

The random image script used on the portfolio page came from some code by Matt Mullenweg.

I’ll be surprised, albeit pleasantly, if there are no bugs. That being said let me know if you find any, or if you have any other suggestions. What do you think of the forms? Are the inputs too confusing? It’s kind of a pain to get the focus on the inputs in the contact form in IE… I almost want to not do anything about it to punish anyone using IE, but I need some work and you just never know from whom it may come.

Also, what do you think of the presentation of my work? The web design page could use some mods, but I need to get some stuff up and running before I can do much with it. Some of the sites are no longer available so I need to make some WordPress themes out of ‘em and put ‘em on here for download.

In short, this is the new look of the site, I’d love to hear what you think, and I hope you’ll check back for the new stuff I’m planning on doing in the (hopefully) near future.

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I just found a bug! Be on the lookout.

ascetic is a template theme I designed a little while back to speed up my design process. I’ve only used it half a time since creating it, so it’s listed as beta and i’ll update it as I use it more.

Features:

• Widget ready
• IE .png fix
• Separate IE stylesheet (blank since the theme is intended for development use and would have to be completely redone anyway)
• Google code to make lesser versions of IE behave more like IE 8
• Update message for any version IE version less than 8

I appreciate any feedback/advice you may have.

Download ascetic.

Please ignore the animated .gif… One of those things you just have to give in to the client on… though this is the least obtrusive animated .gif I’ve ever seen.