After nearly a year with the previous web design, it was time to refresh our website with a new look.

Still built on top of WordPress, our favorite content management platform, this new web design contains a some new features, such as a brand new custom photography portfolio display for our McAllen Photography pages.  What started out as an experiment with Galleria (a Javascript image gallery written in jQuery) and NextGEN Gallery (a WordPress photography gallery plugin) turned into a very easy to manage, and cool-looking (non-Flash based), photography portfolio.  The best part is that it is all controlled through the WordPress administration.  It could probably use some additional tweaking to be a truly great feature, but it does a good job right now.  You can see an example running on our McAllen Wedding Photography portfolio page.

It’s always a welcome challenge in web design to find the perfect balance between function and form.  Over the 12+ years that I’ve been developing websites I’ve found that I really love to make a website as simple as possible for the end user, while retaining powerful features and functions for a site administrator.  That’s one of the primary reasons I love WordPress so much.  It’s very balanced in terms of it’s power and simplicity.

I hope you find this website visually appealing and intuitive to use.  Please feel free to comment on anything you see here!  And as always, think of A Divine Studio for your Pharr, Edinburg, Mission and McAllen web design, development and creative needs.

Great photography is not all about the photographer, it’s about the subject of the photo.  Bringing out the best of person’s features, capturing the lines and light of a building that make it unique, preserving a child’s beautiful expressions for families to enjoy for generations to come… those are the kinds of things that are important.  Sure, a good photographer is very creative, artistic and talented.  But the best photographer knows how to use his or her talents to provide the very best for the client.

With so much experience and talent, you can be sure you are getting the very best when choosing a photographer from A Divine Studio.  Don’t take our word for it, come on by the studio and see firsthand what we can do for you.

If you are in the market for a professional photographer for your wedding, quinceañera, family portrait, commercial project, or any other project, give us a call at (956) 278-0008.

The best work for the best price, period.

Have a look at our photography portfolio for samples of our work.

First off, as of this writing, the website is not launched yet.  It is scheduled to go live on February 16th.

Websites with a lot of content need to be optimized to perform well.  This website for the City of Pharr is certainly not a huge site, but it’s got a couple hundred pages with a fair amount of content.  More importantly, it has a fairly large hierarchy of pages that has created the need for an intuitive navigation system.

The current (or old) site used a vertical navigation with practically unlimited levels of sub-pages.  Some of these were over five levels deep!  I don’t know about you, but those pop-out navigation menus with so many levels annoy me tremendously.  By the time you get down to the third or fourth level, if your mouse moves off of the menu for a moment the menu disappears and you are forced to start over again.  Yuk!

This large menu issue was resolved through the use of large horizontal drop down menus, driven by jQuery and CSS, and a little hoverIntent goodness to give the user a better experience by delaying the mouseout event long enough for the pointer to leave the menu and come back within a few milliseconds without closing.

Functionally, it is great and looks beautiful.  However, I encountered a problem with performance and load times due to the number of queries needed to retrieve the different page lists.  Originally, I used the standard wp_list_page() function, passing in a child_of parameter based on the pages I wanted.  The largest menu was for the City’s departments and used eight function calls to wp_list_pages().  In conjunction with the other menu items, this turned out to be unacceptably slow.  Every page would load sluggishly and (in Firefox) I could see the navigation menu bar rendering slowly with each page load.

So I removed all of the calls to wp_list_pages() and opted for a temporary hard-coded navigation menu.  What a difference!  Now what I plan to do is build a custom function that will generate the navigation structure that I want without using wp_list_pages().  This way I can have fine-grain control over the query and pull out all the pages I need with a single function call.

I’m not into writing tutorials, so if you are interested in the code, feel free to check out pharr-tx.gov (after Feb. 16th) to see how the menu system works.  If you are interested in the WordPress/PHP side, just shoot me an email.

Cheers!

From a web design perspective it was fun and challenging to come up with several prototype website designs that achieved the goals of the project.  Ultimately, the most advanced and “out-of-the-box” website design was selected.  I was pleasantly surprised at this choice because it is more common that a more typical web design is chosen for government and corporate websites.

I am a big fan of using WordPress as a content management system due to its flexibility and power.  As a result, WordPress is going to be powering the new Pharr website.  As a CMS it can be employed to do just about anything due to its great plug-in capabilities.  The new City of Pharr website will utilize over a dozen plugins, some custom developed by me, to do things like manage downloads, event calendars, an employee directory, a business directory, and even send out email notifications to the public when important items are posted to the website.

The official website launch is coming up next month (February).  I am looking forward to receiving the public’s reaction to the site, as well as the feedback from the staff who will actually be using the management tools to keep the website updated.

This will be yet another great WordPress success story for my portfolio!

Divine Wedding Center is a local wedding resource site for the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.  Its goal is to provide specific information regarding weddings and events in our local market, as well as a directory of local businesses in the wedding industry.

The business featured in the wedding center directory represent some of the most talented, well-respected and established wedding vendors here in the Rio Grande Valley.

This is yet another great example of how WordPress (as a content management system) can be customized for just about any purpose imaginable.  Another great feature implemented in this site is the advertising management system, OpenX (openx.org).

Thanks for looking!

Space will be limited, so serious students should enroll early.  One objective beyond the tutorial sessions will be to identify top students who are considering careers in web development as candidates for paid work as outsourced talent for our web development projects.

Curriculum will include:

• Website concept design using Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator
• Web Design Best Practices
• Hand-coded CSS/XHTML
• PSD to XHTML/CSS conversion (slicing and coding)

• Form processing and data validation
• AJAX
• SEO (search engine optimization) prinicples
• Social media integration

• Content Management using WordPress
• PHP, MySQL and dynamic content
• jQuery/Javascript
• Custom blog development

• Extreme WordPress hacking
• Google API integration (Google Maps, Feeds)
• Web application development using PHP/MySQL/AJAX
• Custom theme development for WordPress (or WordPress skinning)

… and more.

Class sessions are offered for three levels of current experience, Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced.  Through some quick questions I can help you identify the level that would be most beneficial to you.

Right now is a great time to enhance your skills and knowledge, set yourself apart from the competition and earn more money!

Head on over to the Web Design Courses page to learn more.

After publishing a new post ReTweet your article to your followers on twitter.com.  Include links to your articles from your Facebook account.  Email copies of your articles to existing customers.  Your renewed contact will at least get your name top of mind, if only for a moment or two.  Sometimes all it takes is a little reminder to get your name back in front of clients or customers to jog them a bit.

Obviously, you will want to stay away from controversial subjects, no matter how impassioned you feel about some topic or current issue.  Try to blog about something your business brings as a solution, without sounding like an advertisement.

You can also reach out in this way to LinkedIn buddies.  Chances are they could find your post interesting enough to mention it to an acquaintance or two.  We’ve discovered that keeping in touch using social media can wind up generating new interest, possibly leading to new business.  In any event, what have you got to lose?

Well, you’d rarely know it by reading the news!  Today’s headlines commonly focus on bad news and negative events.  Let’s face it, the preponderance of bad news versus good is a media fact, and it’s driven by the premise that bad news sells, is preferable because it’s sensational, and we all want it.  Baloney!

Bestowed with ability to reach vast numbers of viewers, Internet news organizations are squandering a golden opportunity for balancing news coverage with in-depth and thoughtful commentary on positive things people are doing.  Headlines nearly always focus on crime, disease or catastrophe, which curiously enough tend to perpetuate their recurrence. Little wonder, with mass media’s continual bombardment keeping them top of mind.

With the exception of a couple of world-renowned news organizations, the worst offenders for headlining bad news include some of the best-known sources on the web.  Rather than name them here, simply go to your favorite online news source, and see if the shoe fits.  Equally at fault are the search engines. With all their flair for innovative access to information and data, their news areas boast a dearth of good news or positive events.  Worse yet, as news sources, search engines offer stories that run a mile wide and an inch deep with little or no focus on constructive, thought provoking commentary.

Now you may ask, “What does all this have to do with designing and building a website?”  Maybe nothing, or perhaps this:  Your website is an opportunity to message the world about the positive impact your products or services convey, in light of fostering a greater good.  There are numerous ways to uplift your audience with your message.  Do it with a blog, your mission statement, or your service pledge.  The world needs more optimism, and you have a platform for being heard.

If any of the following is true about your business, you probably don’t need SEO services for your website.

You don’t need SEO services if …

The population in your target market would not use a search engine to find your business
Believe it or not, there are still many areas throughout the country that do not rely upon the Internet, much less search engines, for all types of information.  As a business owner, you have to know, understand and be keenly in tune with your target market.  Also, each region has its own unique culture and way of doing business, which may not include looking for businesses on the Internet.

You can write great content full of keywords and phrases that searchers are looking for
No one knows your business better than you do.  Marketing companies can spend many hours researching your industry and market, providing you with some great insight, but no one will have the level of passion, knowledge or experience in your business than you do.  It will shine through in the manner in which you write about your business.  So if you have the ability to write well, use it to your advantage and start filling up your website’s pages with some really great content!

Your site already follows the few important best practices that anyone can follow
Yep, there are really only a few important components of a well structured website, as it relates to SEO.  What’s more, most popular content management systems available today already implement these practices on their own.  Which means, once you’ve implemented a good CMS, you can focus on the more important aspects of driving traffic to your site, like writing good content.  Of course you don’t HAVE to use a CMS, but then you (or your Web Developer) will be stuck with difficult task of optimizing your site manually.

Your current marketing strategy is effectively bringing business through the door without the help of your website
SEO is just a subset of marketing.  Just as in marketing, if your target market is not thriving, your SEO strategy will fall flat on the ground.  SEO can only assist your existing marketing efforts when your target market is in good shape.

These are just a few of the many reasons why your business may not need or benefit from SEO services.

As stated in the last point, SEO is just a subset of marketing.  Your business should have a solid ongoing marketing strategy, which may or may not involve SEO.

Skilled writers understand “less is more.”  Purportedly, Hemingway wrote a short story with just six words, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  Appreciating brevity, Twitter limits us to 140 characters per message.

Nothing is less compelling than loquacious narrative.  Incisive text is often profound.  Keep this in mind for your next web page.  Your message just might get read.

Oh, and finally, one often cringes at popular usage.  Misuse, overuse and abuse of the preposition “like” has made an entire generation sound illiterate.  Won’t you help a grammar-starved adolescent dispense with this self-imposed humiliation?  

Every time I hear it, it’s like I’m all “Like dude, that’s so not cool! Like when are you gonna learn how to talk, bro?”  And he goes . . .  and I go . . . and he goes . . . well, you get the drift.