Archive for the ‘wordpress’ Category

The latest custom cms web design project just completed was a recruiting custom CMS and blog that went online earlier today for SynergyHire LLC of Atlanta, Georgia. The main site and matching blog allow the owner to add, edit, or delete content 24/7 without paying each time.

Here is a reduced size graphic screenshot of just one page:

Compare the main site to the matching Atlanta Recruiter custom WordPress theme used on their blog. As with all my designs, the custom integrated blog is a unique one-of-a-kind design for a consistent look moving between the main site and blog.

Other features to consider are the custom logo, clean layout, and special page with 12 audio players to demo their innovative automated candidate phone screen service. Upon review of the initial custom cms web design launch the owner commented “I give you two thumbs up… you did a GREAT job on this Jim!”.

The custom cms website for Corky my puppy was upgraded by adding a custom WordPress blog theme to match the main site. Recent work on the site includes the redesign as well as a series of custom video productions for the Life with Corky website and his story of a shelter dog in text, photos, and video.

Here’s the YouTube version of the latest episode entitled Corky Goes to Doggy Jail, and you may watch all the Corky puppy videos on YouTube, too.

The background music used as the Corky theme song was purchased with royalty free rights from the Music Bakery. All photos and graphics were created by me as part of the custom cms website design. Stories are told in the first person as dicated by Corky, narrated by me, and suitable for all ages. Don’t call the crazy house just yet.

The purpose of having a dog website is to promote adoption of shelter pets worldwide. You can follow Corky the shelter dog tweets on Twitter, also.

This is urgent news. The official WordPress website warns users about older WordPress versions under attack. The most recently released version v2.84 is NOT affected by this security issue and virus attack. For anyone who prefers waiting before upgrading their WordPress blog, this is a wakeup call.

For my clients, your custom WordPress blog design was not affected if I designed and manage your blog. Your blog was upgraded when v2.84 was released, and before this most recent attack began.

If you have a personal blog hosted on WordPress.com, your blog was not affected. For other WordPress blog owners who have not upgraded to v2.84, follow the link above for full details from WordPress. In the future, my advice is to heed the warning of the nag screen in your admin section if informed you’re not running the latest version.

Running the latest version of WordPress is particularly important for fixing security vulnerabilities, as well as enhanced functions.

This tutorial provides advice for sorting posts when telling a story in WordPress. The default display of posts in WordPress is chronological with the most recent being first at the top of the page. For storytelling you may want your posts to display in a more logical order for the reader. There are options for bloggers telling a story in WordPress to have posts display with episodes in a series much like a book chapter by chapter.

The first tutorial method is a simple modification of the code in your template. To display posts in reverse chronological order (oldest first) modify the index.php file in the wp-content/themes/[your theme]/ folder. Look for the line of code and above that add this line of code to have posts display in reverse ascending order.

The next tutorial advice is a WordPress plugin to handle sorting. To allow multiple options for the sort order, you may want to search WordPress for sorting plugins. Some provide options from the backend admin so you can set options for a variety of query types by date, time, author, and more, and then within each of those you may sort results with a second option. For example, the main sort could be by author with those results further sorted by a second field like category or date.

Caution: After reviewing several my advice is checking plugin compatibility to your WordPress installation version before installing.

Finally, this third tutorial and option comes from a WordPress hosted blog of poetry written by my late Grandmother. My choice was to override the WordPress default maximum posts listed, which is 15, and have all 39 poem titles listed alphabetically in the sidebar. After all poem content was prepared and later published in one day in a random order, I created a custom html/text widget to replace the list of recent posts with the alphabetical list of all poems here.

The custom html WordPress widget concept works when the blog content is fixed like that one-time list of all poems, or in a story that gets posted as episodes and the last chapter is published. Just add new links to the sidebar widget as new episodes are posted until complete.

There are more WordPress sort plugins and tutorials, and certainly may be new ones by the time you view this post. The good news is there are options for controlling post chronological sorts when telling a story in WordPress.

A new page for Blogger custom blog design pricing has been revised to include a custom WordPress blog design price. In addition, the price page lists a new service for converting a Blogger template and moving to WordPress. Here is an excerpt from the new blog design price page linked above:

For owners of Blogger format blogs interested in converting a Blogger template and moving to a WordPress template and theme, we can provide optional services. For existing blog designs in Blogger to export from their format and import into a custom WordPress theme, our technique will capture all blog posts.

Visit this blog converted from Blogger to WordPress to see a live example custom WordPress theme and matching main website.

The custom WordPress blog design price page includes the optional service to export from Blogger to WordPress with details on the process involved to maintain all posts, labels, archives, and search engine friendly (SEF) file names.

A long overdue tribute blog in honor of my late grandmother, Beth Parkman (1893-1975), was created and launched in WordPress last weekend. The custom blog features original poems that Grandmother Parkman wrote that were discovered and compiled by her late daughter and my aunt, Eleanor Parkman Heath.

The topics include poems about God, nature, love, and family by Beth Parkman, and more. Her daughter, and my Mom, Blanche Parkman Degerstrom commented about the new blog stating “What a legacy for her children, grandchildren and all to follow. Thank you so much!”.

The WordPress blog features a custom black and white top header showing my Grandmother enjoying the woods of Maine plus a collage of bust portraits of her as young, middle aged, and then later in life. The blog sidebar lists each of her 37 original poems by title in alphabetical order.

A special thanks goes out to my brother, Eric Degerstrom, who took the mimeographed copies of the poems and scanned them using optical character recognition (OCR) to provide digitized plain text of each poem. A lengthy biography of Beth Parkman is included on the About page, also.

Several unique related sites for Commercial Door and Access have relaunched with custom matching graphics and a custom WordPress themed blog on their headquarters website. The corporate headquarters site is at www.cda-solutions.info with a matching blog at www.cda-solutions.info/blog.

All three sites are custom cms web designs that allow the owner to add, edit, or delete content using simple plain text without a high level of technical skills in advanced xhtml or css. Some of the work was in collaboration with my son, Roger Degerstrom, of www.CodeRepair.com for design and seo assistance, yet I will handle ongoing support for this family of sites.

CDA Solutions, Inc. is in the business of commercial construction, maintenance, and security products and services for the Treasure Coast of Florida including the counties of Brevard, Indian River, St Lucie, and Martin. CDA Alliance Inc. has advice for local or national service and maintenance companies and Commercial Door and Access Inc. provides door, lock, security, and related work including construction, so customers have a dependable source with the expertise and credentials to assure quality work.

The CDA family of sites with the matching WordPress blog launched with the new color scheme to provide a consistent look and familiar corporate brand across their range of service, product, and advice websites.

After teaming up and forming Custom CMS Design LLC with my son, Roger Degerstrom of www.CodeRepair.com we launched 4 websites related to custom cms web design as the Custom CMS Design LLC collaboration.

Update 2011: The Custom CMS Design LLC company name and family of websites were discontinued earlier this year and all related websites were taken offline in September 2011.

Roger and I decided to continue to operate our existing commercial websites for solo custom cms web design work as sole proprietors from Virginia and Florida, and actual projects for low cost standard package web design are now offered in a newly formed collaboration at www.5in545.com.

The latest podcast show comparing blog formats from Blogger and WordPress was launched today with advice for small business owners. If you’re undecided about the benefits of blogging, or which format to select, the show gives comparisons of format, ease of use, and other features on these top blog formats.

The show features a review of a new custom matching blog done in WordPress for one of my personal sites, and features bonus tips for advanced plug-in options and themes or templates for WordPress. An integrated blog custom design to match your main site is one of the best search engine optimization techniques I can recommend. Contact me at any time for no obligation free advice about blogging for small business.

I successfully used the cms program Joomla to convert one of my older websites, www.coderepair.com. CMS software, which stands for contact management system, allows website owners to easily add content from a master control panel. The material at Code Repair was originally advice for fixing poorly coded websites, but it has now expanded to cover website design and graphic art design for novice beginners. The purpose is helping newcomers to design business or personal websites or custom graphic art with learn as you go resources.

CMS may not be the best choice for your first website if you’re in a hurry to get online because of the technical aspects. For converting existing sites, salvaging your search engine ranking should be a priority. Each html file on my old site was renamed in the new design, so 301 redirects were implemented so any outstanding backlinks from other sites would forward automatically to the newly named pages. The suffix of the home page was (dot)html and changed to php, yet the page retained the Google pagerank, so the redirects worked.

The new look, color scheme, and layout are done. However the content still has a long way to go. Future additions may include lessons as well as an e-store with related information products for sale. If you, or someone you know, wants the opportunity to learn website design or advice for creating matching custom artwork please visit and bookmark the site.

Update: This site was taken over by my son, Roger Degerstrom. He converted it to a custom cms with a matching custom WordPress blog for his web design business.