New Look

I’m happy to say the website has undergone a new look. I got tired of updating the photos and front page in iWeb. The most minor updates, such as adding a badge for LinkedIn, could take 20 minutes, had to be done on a specific computer, and involve a secondary application to the upload. Sure, the front page looked nice before, but it wasn’t all that fun to add a few photos since the entire website had to be re-uploaded (I guess Apple doesn’t quite understand the concept of “what’s changed”) and I still had to do some jiggery to get it to use the WordPress blog rather than the one that comes with iWeb.

Believe it or not, I had to reference our book Sams Teach Yourself WordPress in 10 Minutes to find a bit of little used knowledge to make a static front page and still retain the blog. Other key things I learned from this experience included custom menus, more in-depth CSS modification (most of the time spent), and installation/configuration of a photo gallery.

Now when I have new content, I can compose from any browser, the iPad or iPhone. Uploading photos and creating albums is made much easier by staying in the WordPress framework. Very simple.

To make the development of the new look easier, I installed a local copy of Apache, MySQL, and PHP which allowed me to get everything done “offline” then upload it to my server when it was the way I liked.

I hope you like it too.

Special thanks to Kreg Steppe for his help.