Consumers Resolution Services LLC, a local Beaverton company that helps consumers and homeowners locate resources to assist them in dealing with creditors and lenders recently became the recipient of a newly developed Wordpress theme by Toms Skyline Design.

This Wordpress theme includes a slider that utilizes the new set thumbnail functionality in Wordpress 2.9.2 and later. The theme includes several options and is a two-column type theme, with a widgetized sidebar and widgetized footer

I also created this header image of a loupe and documents that I thought I would showcase here as well.

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Plews Brews, a local pub, tavern, watering hole and place to meet in St Johns (the area in North Portland) was in need of a new website; when along came Jeffrey Selin. Jeffrey owns another St Johns business, the Dojo Creative Agency. He also frequents the local watering hole and contacted Tom to see about customizing a new site for Plews Brews.

What they wanted was a new Wordpress theme that would represent their business and their connection to the local historic aspects of St Johns. Toms Skyline Design created a new site for them, which of course, includes a lot of CSS, PHP and image editing. Now they only need to begin re-adding content. Good Luck to everyone over at Plews Brews.

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Once again I have nearly wrapped up a face-lift, installation and setup of a newly customized Wordpress site. The site I have been working on is for a local organic restaurant in the St Johns area of Portland, Oregon. Angel, the owner of the restaurant, The LadyBug Cafe, was in need of a face-lift and talked with another St Johns business owner, Jeffrey Selin of the Dojo Creative Agency and they decided to make the switch. Jeffrey and the Dojo, whom I perform behind the scene Web & Wordpress Development for, asked me to help him make the face-lift for the Ladybug site become a reality.

And … Woila … here it is

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However, historically one of the problems with CSS and the various web browsers is that one browser will support some of the standards and not others, and likewise another browser may support a subset of those standards, or a completely different set of standards. So, building sites that render the same way in each of the popular browsers becomes rather tricky. At the time of this post, it appears that Google Chrome 4.1.x is the most compatible with the current stages of the many CSS3 modules. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the designer or developer, as of February, 2010, Google Chrome only accounts for a little less than 12% of all browsers. However, we could see those numbers change in the future. In fact, statistics show it was only a few years ago that over 55% of all web surfers were using Internet Explorer (IE5, IE6 & IE7) and only 36% were using Firefox. The latest results show that Firefox has nearly 47% of the browser market; while IE8, IE7 & IE6 all combined for only about 35% of the browser market. For many web designers this is a good trend because traditionally, IE has been responsible for countless hours of additional work and headaches in the continuing efforts of web professionals working to get pages that render the same in all other browsers to render the same in IE browsers. According to Microsoft, they plan for IE9 to work much better with the CSS3 modules; getting away from the proprietary nightmares in their pre-IE9 browsers. However, the downside is that with IE9 they will not be supporting Windows XP. So, this may backfire on Microsoft. The other major browsers, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Sarari and even Opera support XP. Plus, in potentially 70% of the world, PC users are still using XP and have not upgraded (term used loosely) to Windows Vista or even to Windows 7. From a designer/developer perspective I will be happy when the proprietary prefixes are not needed and multiple hacks in order to get a page to render the same in one browser as in another.

Also, over the years the display size and color depth that a designer needs to take into consideration have varied considerably. 640 x 480 resolution used to be popular. Then it was 800 x 600 which was most popular. Then 1024 x 768 became a popular screen resolution. Along with this we saw the color depth go from 8 bits, to 16 bits and now 24 to 32 bits is most common. Of course, when there was a large enough demographic using each of those three display resolutions and color depths many companies and website owners would want pages to load the same for each resolution; and colors to be consistent with the lowest common denominator of color depth. With newer technology and wide screen displays, as of January of this year, the 1024 x 768 resolution only accounted for 20% of the current screen size; while a whopping 76% were at higher resolution rates … with 1280 x 1024 being the most common.

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TopSlide Screen Shot

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I have been busy and noticed I hadn’t got around to posting to this site in several months. Of course, unless I post some information on here nobody that stops by this site will know if I am still here or not.

Its Another Portland Skyline

Also, several months ago I converted this site over to a Wordpress site and also have my old Rants, Raves & Insights blog up and running on this site, too; notwithstanding that I have not posted to it in almost forever it seems. What I noticed was that I had grown tired of the theme I had been using and decided to build a new Wordpress theme from the ground up. You are looking at it. I call this Wordpress theme, Skyline Two. Website design, coding, Photoshop design and slicing, Flash design and a bunch of PHP coding all go into developing something like this.

This is the second Wordpress theme I have built from scratch in the past few weeks. You can see the other theme at Portlands Foreclosures. I also created a landing page for them too. Check out the “Coming Soon” link on that site to see a Real Estate Listings mockup with a nifty Flash intro.

Speaking of Flash … if you haven’t clicked on the PLAY INTRO link on the header image above … do so now. That’s another Flash intro that I am using here; because I Flash adds to a site, but an entire Flash Driven site is not so good for most sites, because Flash still is not as search engine friendly as standard XHTML and CSS driven sites. Nonetheless, Flash still looks cool and adds some pizazz to a site. In fact, I have recently put together a couple other sites that include Flash banners. Check out Just Settle My Debts and Renegotiate My Home Loan websites.

Rather than run on a bunch on this post, I will keep it short by saying that I have also been doing some social media marketing with Facebook and Twitter, some online classified marketing, developed some landing pages, tying some of them to lists and autoresponders. I also put together a few ebooks and done a little bit of work with Joomla, too. I will write more later to update the site.

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“If your business is a little slow right now, this is the perfect time to take care of the web design you have been putting off.”

Of course, it may be you don’t have a website yet. That is another reason why NOW is a perfect time to promote your business with a professional web design so you can get your business on the internet and start taking advantage of the exciting revolution in marketing that is currently taking place. Notwithstanding the weak economy, representing your business with a unique web design is one of the most effective ways of distinguishing yourself from your competition. Toms Skyline Design can customize a site for you with a myriad of layout and color options. Right now, there is not a better way to invest into your company’s future growth than with a well designed website that is taking advantage of today’s interactive marketing boom. Let’s stop for a minute, in case you do feel your business is a cookie cutter operation. It may be that you are governed by a franchise agreement, or an affiliate agreement. That’s okay, too. You can still maintain compliance and be able to distinguish yourself from your competitors, so that others will want to invest in you and your business, too. Web design solutions for those types of scenarios simply require additional steps.

Find out more about our web design services here.

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In the process, I have included a plugin which added a Twitter button on all pages, posts and comments. So, now if you place a comment to any posts on this site you can tweet it, too.

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In short, the answer is no, it is not a quick process. Joomla contains thousands of files and if you are upgrading, you should set up a test server that is configured as closely as possible to your live Joomla site and then set up the test site. It can be fairly risky trying to update your live site; and bypass this step. It will take time of course. But, it is better than losing all of your work and countless hours invested.

If you are planning on a fresh install of Joomla, it is best if you have shell access. If you do not, trying to upload the files via ftp is a bit tricky. In fact, I have read that you cannot set it up via ftp. However, that is not entirely true. You can use Dreamweaver or other similar IDE to upload your Joomla files via ftp. However, you will need to open each folder and each sub-folder or sub-directory, and each of the sub-directories below and then only select part of the files to upload at one time. You will need to repeat this process as many times as necessary to upload all of the files. If you simply try to upload all of the files at one time, it may appear that the task completed okay; and you may even get a report that all files were uploaded. The fact is, not all of the files were actually uploaded. This can cause a lot of frustration trying to setup Joomla, if you think all the files are there; when in actuality they are not. So use SSH if you can.

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