They already had a site based on Joomla, but were looking for something friendlier and easier to work with. I think we accomplished the goal.

The key design is based on a commercial theme that I purchased to get things rolling. Not much was modified as far as colors and textures go, but much of the layout was heavily customized.

For example, I updated the theme’s home page to pull in content from quite a few different sources: several Pages along with use of Post category lists. This allows the site maintainers access to change just about anything without having to dip into theme code.

The Sermons page is another example of customization. It is configured as a regular WordPress Page to allow them easy access to update themes. That Page is using a custom page template that pulls in Posts with the current sermons’ category to the bottom. When the sermon series changes they just re-categorize those posts and update the Page’s banner to the new theme. The old sermons show up on the “Archived Sermons” category listing. I’m rather pleased with how that worked out.

As you click around the site you’ll also find shadow-boxes, vimeo integration, authorize.net and google calendar as well.

We also used the brilliant new WP Help plugin to add documentation directly from the admin pages. That’s a plugin that I look forward to using more in the future.

They already had an existing site and wanted some images changed and some SEO (search engine optimization) tuning and other minor changes. The challenge was that the older site was HTML table based and most images were actually sliced into many pieces and then assembled as table cell foregrounds, backgrounds, etc. Not friendly to modify!

After some discussion we opted to move them to the WordPress framework. The client chose the free Blue Diffusion theme as their base and then I customized it a bit and moved over all of their existing content. With the help of the jQuery Colorbox and NextGEN Gallery plugins, their Photos page offers two different styles of galleries. Check it out!

After just a small amount of training, the customer now has a site that they can modify content and images themselves and a whole new look

The site design is a mild customized version of the iDream theme. The sidebar navigation relies on the Flexi Pages navigation widget. This project is the first that I've used that one and I'm quite pleased with how well it works.

Now we have a site in place that the client will be able to modify the content of for himself. We have some little bits here and there to touch up, but opted to push it out live last week to get it out there for folks to enjoy.

I’ve converted the Solo Technology site to WordPress and added a bunch of content about some of the projects that I’ve tackled over the past couple years.

As part of the conversion I also did some theme work. This particular theme started life as the free Revolution Code Blue theme. A customized header and a bunch of CSS tweaking and we’re no longer nearly as blue.

While the theme is quite serviceable for here, it has more work ahead before I install it over to the Tech Blog. Stay tuned for that one, updates will include threaded comments and other more “bloggy” bits.

I will be providing support for an existing ETL application that feeds their SQL Server 2005 data warehouse. We started the project by reviewing and documenting the existing ETL scripts -- a collection of batch files, most running sqlcmd with existing .sql scripts -- most of which then call a few stored procedures. There's a custom .NET app in there somewhere too...

The database design is just a handful of "core" tables in 3NF and half a dozen lists tables used in the Access forms for combo boxes and such. There are main application forms along with lookup date management forms where they can mark items active/inactive and control the display order. While Access isn't always the best choice, for an app like this with just a couple of users it is a great fit.

As I write this (early May) we're just about done wrapping up the reports part of the project which is always the most iterative or interactive (imho).

First I spent some time running more nmap scans on their internal network. They thought they had seen signs of "extra" PCs on the network so wanted more assurance that everything was as it should be. I identified all devices by IP and MAC address and then verified that we could match each to a machine in the office. Fortunately, it all matched up as expected.

Next up was putting some backups in place. We're going with MozyPro to start. They don't need a ton of data backed up and the cloud storage model is much preferred over buying tape drives, tapes and arranging for off-site storage. We have MozyPro installed on their main file server and it has been diligently running nightly backups without issue so far.