My friend Tricia is a great photographer and really sweet girl, so of course when she asked me to help her re-launch her portfolio site I said yes. Previously, her site had been a standard Flash-based site – the kind used by many photographers – and she wanted something different and easy to update.
She’s already blogging on Wordpress.com, so I suggested she use a self-hosted Wordpress installation as her portfolio site. It will be easy for her to update, she can add functionality as her site grows and it’s much, much more search-engine friendly than her old Flash site. Read more
I recently finished working with a client on a project that had a lot of requirements. She wanted to be able to share videos online, with minimal fuss and no technical skill, and wanted the videos to be accessible only to those she wanted to see them. It was a pretty obvious choice to use WordPress, because of its ease of use. Here’s a list of the other applications and plugins I used to set up their site.
Convert videos to FLV
SoThink Flash Video Encoder
One of the few things the client had to purchase to make the site work, encoding software not only makes the video viewable online, it also drastically reduces file size. SoThink’s video encoder is $45 and is designed for Windows. But if you have a Mac, try iSkysoft Video Converter.
Upload the videos to the server
FileZilla
Each video file was at least 50 MB, so transferring files with FTP was the logical choice. There are any number of free FTP clients available. Though I use FireFTP on my own computer, it’s a FireFox extension and the client uses IE. So I recommended FileZilla, which is a great free FTP program.
Display the videos on WordPress
Wordtube plugin
I tried several different plugins for displaying the FLV files. I finally settled on this because it has an easy user interface that makes it simple to add videos to the backend, and places an “insert Flash video” button in the post creation window. It works in conjunction with the JW FLV player from Longtail Video, which is free for noncommercial sites.
Keeping it private
WordPress Password plugin
This plugin protects your entire WordPress site with a universal password. Just give it to anyone who you want to access the site. You still have to enter your own password to get into the admin pages. It’s also easy to change the password if you ever need to.
So how many elections did we have last year? Seems like at least a dozen, though it was probably only about half that. For the bigger elections, like the primaries and the November general election, the Rome News-Tribune had full results pages to show vote totals as they came in. In the smaller elections, though, I just made a simple HTML table that the numbers could easily be inserted into. Here’s an example of the HTML for one of those tables.
What it looks like:
| xx of xx precincts reporting |
| Office 1 |
| Candidate 1 |
xx |
| Candidate 2 |
xx |
| Candidate 3 |
xx |
| Candidate 4 |
xx |
| Office 2 |
| Candidate 2 |
xx |
| Candidate 3 |
xx |
| Candidate 4 |
xx |
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I worked on MagnoliaWoman.com, a Web site for a new woman’s magazine, for several weeks. One of the last things I did was design a page for the “She Said” feature, which uses quotes and photos of local women. My editor wanted to use all the quotes and all the pictures on the Web site, so I had to find a way to package them attractively.
I think this CSS styling worked nicely. It’s very customizable for colors, etc., and the empty div at the end ensures that it will work even if you have a short quote that doesn’t take up the whole box.
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As I learn more about Web design, I realize how easy it is to make a mistake that causes your site to not work properly on a certain browser, or to forget about users with smaller screen resolutions. Firefox is my browser of choice, so that is what my work is usually tested in first. What I have learned the hard way is that it is important to test your work throughout the process, not just when you’re done. Trust me, it’s much easier to fix a problem when you’re checking along the way.
The main things I check as I go along are cross-browser compatibility, markup validation and resolution. My favorite tools to make that easier include a resolution tester, the W3C markup validator, Browsershots and a couple of Firefox extensions. All of these tools are free.
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