Here's my checklist/ to do list for the week to ensure things get done:

photo credit: Great Beyond

Two days ago, I mentioned that I was working on a new photography based website for a friend. I've known the guy I'm doing it for for years and even before we discussed the site in any detail, I think I had an idea of the kind of look he'd be after. After talking with him, he confirmed I was right.

The spec. for a the site was a really clean and simple look that he could use to showcase his photography work. He wanted the first page to show a single shot which linked in to a list of galleries. In my previous post, I had a look at some of the gallery plugins available for WordPress and decided to go with kPicasa that links in to Picasa. I'm really happy with how simply this plugin works.

Anyway, getting back to how powerful WordPress is, I was looking for a really simple theme and came across the sliding door theme. I thought, it would be nice to use customised images in the sliding header to personalise the site for Ciaran, strip away the sidebar and just run with a nice plain black site. I had this up and running on the site yesterday, but we had a talk about it and agreed that it wasn't right. I went theme hunting in the WordPress Theme Directory and within 5 minutes came back with the Capricorn Theme by Shaibani. It's really really simple, have a look at a demo of the original theme here and now look at CallumPhotography.com (or below) to see what I've done with it.

The site isn't finished yet but I'm happy enough to let you have a look. I'll be tweaking it over the next week to finish it off to Ciaran's liking and hopefully fix a few layout issues that I'm not happy with. What I like about it so far is that I was able to get this far in one day with WordPress using a very simple theme and a few plugins. That shows the power of WordPress. If I was trying to design a site like this from scratch, I'd be there for weeks, if not months doing it. Even for someone who's familiar with WordPress, it would be hard to spot that this is a WordPress site if I stripped away the links in the footer at the bottom. So with a few hours working on the site and a couple of talks with Ciaran and we're nearly there already. It might not be the best site in the world but he say's it's 'exactly' what he was after so that's good enough for me.

Another great thing about using WordPress for this site (although it's not a typical blog) is that Ciaran can login in to the WordPress control panel and take ownership of the site. This is way better than me asking him for his photos, uploading a bunch of files on to a server and thinking that's the job done. That might work for some people, but for me that's not what it's about. It's Ciaran's site and I'll be helping him get to grips with WordPress and gain a better understanding of how he can edit the site himself to put his own spin on it and keep the site alive! If I handed over a static website that wasn't easily configured he'd get bored with it in a week, but if I give him something to play about with the site becomes his and he's gonna be more interested in growing it. The longer any I site I create remains active and online is only a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

I've also done my first bit of custom coding for WordPress for this one. If you have a look at the homepage on callumphotography.com, you'll see that it displays a random image depending on the time that you load the page. Test this out by reloading the page after about ten seconds and you should see a new photograph up there (it's running 6 different images at the minute). It's nothing spectacular but I'm thinking of customising the code a bit more so that it's easily adaptable for Ciaran to change what images are loaded up at specific times. I'm even thinking of having a go at creating my first WordPress plugin from it. There will be a bit of work involved in this, if I go ahead, but it would be a great experience for me to make my own plugin freely available to the public and to myself for use on other sites.

So this site demonstrates exactly what you can achieve with WordPress in a few days. The look and feel of a custom built site with functionality exactly as per the client requirements. I still have a few issues to iron out on this one and Ciaran needs to sort out his galleries to get some content up there and complete the site but it's not looking to bad at the minute. I also changed the front page on the WordPress site to a static page and included a blog space for him so he has the option of writing about his photographs. We will also look at integrating a way of selling his work from the site further down the line. I've enjoyed working on this one so far and you should expect a few updates on it over the Summer months!

My mate who lives across the road is after a website to showcase his photography, so I've been working on it since yesterday. I was looking about for suitable gallery plugins for WordPress for it and there's plenty available, but to create something suitable for what I'm after wants it looks like I'd have to do a good bit of custom coding. I'm sure I can do this, but because this site will have a really clean look, I'm keeping things as simple as possible. The guy I'm doing it for Ciaran aka Kipper normally pops his pics up on his facebook or myspace profile so it'll be nice for him to have somewhere central to store them from now on. Doing this site is interesting for me as it's a photoblog as opposed to a writer's blog so I'll be stripping a lot of the normally functionality within WordPress back to the bare bones (we can add it back in later if he gets the blogging bug ). Have a look at some of Ciaran's pics here, I'm sure you'll agree there's some great shots up there! I'm gonna get him to show me a few tricks so I can get a few more 'good' pictures up on this blog too at some stage!

photo credit: ohad*

Anyway, getting back to the gallery plugins for WordPress, the one's I looked at were:

As I mentioned, I'm keeping things simple so I'm on the look out for a nice clean WordPress theme and a few more plugins to complete the site. At the minute Ciaran's talking about adding a guestbook, contact form and might also want an online store to sell his work. I'm enjoying working on this one to date and should have something to show in the next few days. It's really handy being able to walk 20 metres across the road to make sure we're on the same wavelength for how the site should look. More on this later...

I installed Google Analytics a while back. When I launched my new blog theme a few days ago, I've since realised that I overwrote all the files for my theme and therefore replaced the Google Analytics code. I don't know if many people have made this mistake before, but it took me a few days to pick up on what I'd done. My Google Analytic stats weren't rising and I knew there was something wrong as I was checking my AWS stats that I installed as part of my hosting plan and this blog actually had it's best day of traffic since I started out. So this is just something to be aware of, if you're updating your WordPress theme. Yeah I know I'm spending lots of time looking at stats but I'll be making more of an effort to boost traffic very soon so it's something I need to be looking at.

photo credit: richardmasoner

It's easiest just to place the Google Analytics code in footer.php as the footer shows up on every page and therefore this tracks all hits on your website. There's a nice article on exactly what to do over at ThemePlayground.com. It cleared things up for me as I previously thought I needed to put the Google Analytics code in a few different files, but it turns out that footer.php is the only place it needs to go! If you're using WordPress, there's lots of other nice tips on ThemePlayground and I'll be checking back there for a few tips and tricks as I continue to update this site.

I just uploaded my new blog theme. Everything seems to be working fine for now so hopefully I don't find too many problems along the way It's based on the default WordPress wide theme that I had been using previously and I've customised the header image, sidebar and added some links to my social networking profiles. There's now links to my Twitter and Facebook accounts and others in the nav bar... expect more stuff here soon!

Last week I added the countdown timer to pressurise myself into getting this done and I'm launching a few hours ahead of schedule. Although there's a bit more I'd like to have done, putting the countdown timer there made sure the theme got uploaded today and saves me tweaking for weeks on end trying to make everything 100% perfect and putting off the launch date again and again. I'll definitely be using this method again to get things done!

This is only version 0.1 of my customised wordpress theme and I have lots of changes still in mind for it.

Things I'm happy about:
I'm pretty happy with the general look and feel of the design. It's now a more personalised site which I thought it should be, as after all it's my online cv and I'm the man responsible for getting things done on this site and on other projects I'm working on. I had always intended to create a caricature of myself on the site and tried to give it a 3d like look by leaning over the navigation bar into my site to let readers know who's behind it. I think I've achieved this by gripping my hand over the nav bar. In general, I think the style and layout of the header looks good.

photo credit: Netream

Things I'm not happy about:
As I mentioned above this is only version 0.1 of my updated WordPress theme and there's lots more still to do. I think the cartoon that I created of myself needs some more work and I'd like to brighten it up a bit. I'll be styling the sidebar on the right hand side of the site to fit in a bit more with the look and feel of the rest of the site. I'll also be changing the style of the post titles and maybe the font used in the posts themselves. There's lots of other stuff too that I want to update pretty soon. One thing that is really annoying me is the way that the images for the site load up. It doesn't look good at the minute but I'll get this fixed by changing the background colours etc. to match a bit more. There's also some colour mismatch at the top of the page but these are simple fixes and I'll get them all sorted. The size of the images I'm using can also probably be reduced and I'll look in to doing this too.

So along with the update to version 2.8 of WordPress, my first major site update seems to have went smoothly enough. Here's a look back to what my site looked like at the very beginning. And I'll add a screenshot below here to to show how the site looks at the time of writing this on the 28th of June 2009. I like doing this as it tracks progress on how this blog is evolving:

You can see the comparison in the screenshot above on how the blog looked original and how it looks after my first major update. I think it's come a long way! I'm coming up to my 50th post and hopefully this and the theme update proves my commitment to developing my online presence with even more projects. I've talked before about potential partnerships. I'm hoping this level of commitment and the design of the theme itself gives others an idea of what I'm capable off. I'll be meeting face to face with a potential partner on Tuesday this week regarding multiple projects. As soon as we get things sorted officially, I'll be updating the new ads section on this site with details of these new projects that I'll be involved in!

So things are moving on for me and my online ventures. I was reluctant to push too hard and try to begin new visitors to this site until I had customised the theme, but there's no stopping me now and I'll be trying to boost traffic to this blog now that it gives more of an idea of who's behind iliveontheweb.com. This is version 0.1 and I wont be leaving things like this! Expect version 1 proper... maybe not today.. maybe not tomorrow... but it'll be here!