Clark Studios Web Blog

Spending time away from my blog has been common practice for me as of late – I could use an excuse of “I’m too busy” but that is not the case, but I somewhat think it will be very soon.

This month has probably been the most exciting and rewarding for me of late as I have managed to get 4 web projects from my website, Hooray!. One is a static site with wordpress integrated, another a bespoke CMS and Showbiz Spy comes home (Another wordrpress site). I also have some consultancy on a WordPress project and helping implementation from a local to live enviroment. I can wait.

So what else is new, Well I found and finally signed up to carbonmade an online portfolio site which I will be using to showcase designs to clients, it just beats an online secure area which would just be a nightmare to build with all this work going on. I am officaly now a GAWDS member (Guild of Accessible Web Designers, you can see my ugly mug and profile at their website .

In terms of coding I actually sat down and played with Paypal’s sanbox, and got all the IPN crap working. You are probably wondering why not sooner? well to be fair I have not really needed to know it, but now I do I decided to have a play.

Nascar Skins seems to be doing well, I just dont have the time to update it and create more skins and will be releasing a new upload your skin page soon so it is self populated. Also Graphic River was unvailed and I have got to say it is a fantastic website, I love it! – Istock vectors for $20 sod off!, $5 for some awesome work good effort from the envato boys.

I plan to release some new freebies soon, so keep coming back.

You havent heard from me in a while I know a bit slack really from my good self.

I have been really hammering away at wordpress and working with it’s API. I have got to be honest I have learnt so much it is unbeliavble, the best thing was learning about all the bits and pieces that you don’t look into as I normally just use it as a news section for clients sites.

What I have noticed is the abillity to manipulate the way it works and build around the way it works and how easy it is to add the theme options and extended functions to make the site do what you want to do. I finally loooked at the Custom Fields in posts and realised how easy it is to add them to really give your posts an extra dimension instead of just having a list of posts.

Normally with CMS WP installaions what you find is it is just the Pages that end up being used and the posts are applied as News within the site. What I have found is a way of making posts power various parts of the site so you cna have many dynamic CMS pages, its all very good.

At the end of the day I would still favour bespoke builds of CMS over a WP installation any day as in my opnion WordPress is a blogging platform and that is what it should be used for, but then again it is easier to use rather than drupal or joomala in my opnion which to a client you need to have a degree in computer sciences to even comprehend how it all works.