HECM World

Sacramento, CA
This WordPress website to offers two content types: free content for anyone to access and member-only content in the form of premium reports and a member-only forum area. Once a visitor registers and makes his payment (through PayPal Standard), he may then immediately download the premium reports or access the member-only forums.
http://hecmworld.com

Roca Services

Washington D.C.
We transformed our client’s existing static website into a WordPress website with a completely new design. WordPress allows the client to update all content himself without knowing HTML. Offered in two languages, site highlights include an area where customers may pay their invoices online and a bi-lingual contact form for service inquiries.
http://rocadc.com

Business Matters

Geneva, IL
Business Matters broadcasts weekly podcasts about the impact of business on public policy and communities. We provide ongoing support and custom plugin development for this WordPress website. A highlight includes the the monthly podcast archives page which may be browsed through a point-and-click javascript interface.
http://businessmatters.net

The Mighty Sparrow

Red Bluff, CA
The Mighty Sparrow is a project of the California Parks Companies which aims to be your one destination for everything related to the California outdoors. We built this WordPress website by customizing a child theme of the popular Mimbo magazine theme. Other customizations include a most popular posts list, comments by Disqus, and site search with the Google Custom Search engine.
http://themightysparrow.com

in the Mix

Woodstock, GA
in the Mix is the online counterpart to the print magazine of the same name. Highlights from this WordPress website include a rotating banner on the home page, ad spots managed by the client, and celebrity recipes where visitors can search drink recipes by various criteria. Posts are organized on an issue basis as well as by category and tag.
http://inthemix.on-premise.com

Where the heck is that extra padding coming from!?!

Bless the day that I heard about Firebug, an add-on for Firefox that allows you to highlight different HTML objects on your page and see the styles associated with that object. See that 10px extra padding on your image? That’s coming from line 131 of your styles.css file.

The only problem is when, as usually happens, you need to debug CSS between different browsers. IE8 almost never renders the page the same way as IE6, IE7, Firefox 1, 2 3, Safari, and Opera. (Yes, I have all these browsers installed on my computer.) Although I haven’t used it yet, Firebug Lite apparently solves this problem. It is a Javascript file that simulates Firebug’s features in any browser. I will definitely try that out and report back on my findings. In the meantime, anyone else try this?

Three websites that I know of are OpenWebDesign.org, OSWD.org, and FreeCssTemplates.org Many of the designs are made by professional designers. They post free designs as a way to generate interest in their paid services. You are free to download the designs and modify them as you please, as long as you leave the “Designed by” link at the bottom of the page. This is one of my favorite designs, and this is a free design we downloaded and modified for a client to work with our website editing tool.

As I wrote in my WordPress Themes post, there are also many of places to find free themes for your WordPress blog. And if you find a design you like on the free design sites I mentioned above, they can be easily modified to work with a WordPress blog.

Get searching!