The hoop(s) brain is actually the first website I created with a WordPress back-end.  I had heard of some of the other common CMS softwares out there, like Joomla, Drupal, and Expression Engine.  Now in the interest of full-disclosure, I should probably mention that I haven’t tried any of these other CMS programs.  I probably will at some point just to experiment with them.  What drew me to WordPress is that it seemed like a lot (I mean, a lot) of the top-notch web designers/bloggers out on the internets are using WordPress.  And pretty much everyone agrees that WordPress is easy to use, and highly customizable with themes and plug-ins.  Being a Mac user, I recognized the importance of simplicity, elegance, and power in a single package.   So when it came to redesigning this site, I decided to try WordPress and I haven’t looked back.

So far, it’s been pretty amazing.  I think the biggest two things that I love about WordPress are all the available plug-ins (although sometimes there are so many, it seems daunting to find the right one) and the ease of quickly creating pages and new posts.  Prior to using WordPress, all of my HTML was hard-coded and required manual editing, which could be extremely time consuming.

WordPress makes it very easy to get started with a blog if you’ve never designed a website before.  Unfortunately, if you want to get beyond that and start customizing things, it’s not really obvious what the best way is to go.  A lot of folks will find  a theme that they like and customize it a little bit.  I knew right away that I wanted something I could really customize, but didn’t have to start from scratch on.  That’s when I discovered theme frameworks and child themes.

Theme frameworks are like a bare-bones theme you use as the structure of your site.  Most frameworks already have a lot of functionality built-in to them, and are flexible enough that you can customize the theme a lot, primarily through CSS.  You can then create a child theme, which uses the theme framework, but allows you to customize it separately.  That way you can upgrade the theme framework without breaking your child theme (usually ).  The theme framework I’m using is Thematic, by Ian Stewart.  Again in the interest of full disclosure, this is the only theme framework I’ve tried.  However, I am happy with Thematic and have not had much in the way of issues with it.  I then created my own child theme for this site and made all my customizations there.

I’m not going to talk about every little setting in WordPress, but I’m going to give you a quick overview of the plug-ins I use:

• Advanced Tagline – I use this to post the random tagline in the site header.  It’s fun.
• Akismet – This is a complete no-brainer.  Haven’t really gotten many comments on the blog yet, but Akismet has already prevented many spam comments.
• All in One SEO Pack – Another no-brainer for easily changing your site’s SEO information.
• Contact Form 7 – I used this to create the form on the contact page.  Was pretty easy to use and setup, so I have no complaints.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – I’m a big fan of Google Analytics and have used it before.  This plugin makes it very easy to set it up in WordPress.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Takes a couple of minutes to set up, but after that there’s nothing to it.
• No Self Pings – Seems like a no-brainer – this plugin keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.
• Really Simple CAPTCHA – this works with Contact Form 7 to prevent email form spam.
• Search Unleashed – Lets you search everything on the site, not just the default stuff WordPress lets you search.  Again, very easy to setup.
• Secure WordPress – Simple to set up, yet makes your WordPress site more secure.
• Sociable – I know there are several different plugins that offer a quick and easy way to submit to various social networking sites, but I like Sociable from what I’ve seen.
• WordPress Popular Posts – If you’re blogging, this seems like a very useful plugin, which just inserts a list of your most popular posts into a widget area.
• WP-PageNavi – Adds pagination to your blog posts, which greatly improves on the standard WordPress method of previous article/next article.

That rounds out the various plugins I use.  I’m sure there are lots of other cool plugins out there.  Sometimes you just need a use for it.  Got any suggestions for plug-ins?  Post ‘em in the comments.

Hope you enjoyed this series of articles on the tools I use to create this website.  Maybe you learned something.

Often (but not always), the first tool I reach for when I have a new website to develop is not on the computer at all, but is usually in the desk next to it.  You guessed it – the very low-tech pencil and paper.  I find it easier to quickly sketch out ideas on paper.  They don’t have to be good sketches!  You’re not going to be hanging these up in a gallery or anything.  Sketching out a layout, or writing down ideas or site structure helps me get an idea of what the site should be like.  As you write down more ideas and draw more sketches of layouts, you can get progressively more detailed and by the end, have a pretty clear idea of what the site will be like.

The next tool I pull out of the toolbox is almost always Adobe Photoshop.  Working from my sketches, I’ll basically just work in Photoshop until I have a complete mock-up of the site completed.  If I’m working with a client, of course there is some back-and-forth at this point with revisions and changes to the mock-up.  Photoshop is such a standard, that once you become familiar with it, it’s hard to use any other graphics program.  In a lot of ways, this is the most fun part of the process of creating a website for me.  It’s the point where the ideas and sketches which are very rough, come together into an actual design, which is the whole reason I do what I do.

Once the design mock-up is completed and ready to be converted into a real website, there are a few different software tools  I use.  One thing I will get into in the next post in this series is how I use WordPress to create the back-end of the site and write code.  For a lot of the coding the site, I simply do things through WordPress, however sometimes it’s necessary to edit a file locally.  When doing that, my plain-text editor of choice on the Mac is TextMate.  I used to regulary use TextWrangler, which I still think is a good text editor (plus it’s free, which helps), but I like TextMate’s minimalism, features, and overall elegance more.  On the Windows side, I usually use Notepad++ or Microsoft Sharepoint Designer, both of which work pretty well and are also free.

Since we’re talking about coding, I should probably mention some of the fantastic extensions I use in Firefox.  The main extension I use and love is Firebug, which makes working with CSS sooooo much easier.  Another very useful extension is the Web Developer toolbar, which has a lot of useful functions for CSS, validation, and many other tools.  I actually probably don’t use even half of the functionality that is built into it.  Some other handy extensions I use are ColorZilla (for finding color codes on a page), MeasureIt (which gives you an on-screen ruler for pixel measurements), and IE Tab (for quickly previewing the way a page looks in Internet Explorer, without having to leave Firefox).

Rounding out the software toolbox is FTP programs.  On the Mac, I am a big fan of Panic’s Transmit.  Whenever I try to use another FTP program, I always find myself comparing it to Transmit and wondering why it isn’t more like it.  On the Windows side, I use Core FTP LE, since it’s free and is kinda-sorta like Transmit.  It’s a Windows program, what do you expect?

So that’s the software tools I use when developing websites.  Software is amazingly important and can make such huge difference in your workflow and efficiency.  I’m sure there are certainly other good alternative programs out there, this is just what I’ve found works best for me.  If you have any good alternative programs to suggest, put it in the comments.

Next time, I’m going to explain the different plug-ins and other tools I use in WordPress.  Subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll automatically get that article, when it comes out.

Enjoy experimenting and trying out new software.  You never know when something will surprise you.

I guess you could describe my hardware as a Low End Mac setup.  My main computing workhorse is a circa 1999 Apple Blue & White G3 Power Macintosh, running Mac OS X 10.4.11, Tiger (the latest it can run).  This guy has a Daystar/XLR8 600MHz G4 processor upgrade, 896MB of RAM (yes I know, that’s a bit unusual), and an PCI ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card.  The Blue & White also has a Sonnet Tempo ATA133 PCI card, two 120GB hard drives, and a Pioneer DVR-107D single-layer DVD burner.  I also have a Wacom Graphire3 tablet that I use once in a while.

I have a love/hate relationship with this machine.  While it gets the job done and runs surprisingly well for as old as it is, if definitely has some gremlins in it.  Over the years I’ve learned to understand and predict its sometimes quirky nature.

I’m definitely a Mac guy, although I would not appreciate being called a fanboy.  I do have a couple of PCs running Windows XP around the house, which I mostly use for Internet Explorer testing or running Apophysis occasionally.

I hope to soon get one of the new 2009 Mac minis, so I can at least be somewhat in the modern age.  I will also be able to do Internet Explorer testing right on the same machine, which will be mighty convenient.  Will I sell the Blue & White when the Mac mini comes along?  No – we understand each other too well.

Come back soon for part 2 (or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed), and I will be discussing what software tools I use to create websites.

This is my first time using WordPress. I used to do all my sites by hand, coding every last bit and character. While that is fun and fulfilling, it doesn’t make sense for most people. I know average Joe and average Jane out there aren’t comfortable with making updates to their site in a text editor. The beauty of this is that it really makes things easier for me too. Kiddies, as you get older you will begin to realize that.

So where do we go from here? I’m not certain exactly. I suppose you will see some random blog posts here and there. I do know that I’ve got a lot of material waiting to be posted online. So I will have plenty of things to release on a regular basis. Some of my old content that was posted on my previous sites can be found here now, so at least there is something to look at.

So stay tuned, and you might see something you like later on. Have a nice day.

Brian