While this website script integrates a great Store, my personal creations and services as a Web Designer are always personalized and optimized according to the client’s needs and accordingly agreed upon. Website developments vary in terms of scripts, software and license agreements… and all this fluctuates and changes rapidly. Additionally, these are paid in U$ – so if that is not your local currency – for instance in South Africa – we have to consider exchange rates as well.

However, all this is worked into a fully transparent and fair quote with a clear time schedule attached to it that both client and web designer should adhere to.

Payments are a minimum of 50% in advance to get the ball rolling. Why? They cover expenses the web designer has and without which he can’t start.

It is fair to say that in the international arena a professional website starts at around U$3,000, from where it can easily jump to astronomical heights, depending on the work involved and the items to be purchased.

Creating a Gorgeous Gardens Website is about beauty – meaning captivating photography and why not drawings, sketches, paintings – art in brief. It strongly appeals to our fantasy and our senses – especially the visual sense… and if we all know how intense and exhilarating the fragrances can be!

Imagine a field of lavender buzzing with bees… a wild star jasmine snaking up its way in an old tree… not to mention a rose…!

Picking a wild berry and eating it straight from the twig while hearing the wind rustling through leaves, the cheerful songs of birds and the graceful sound of chimes projects us into a fairy world where we can release and let go… feel One with all that is and refuel on energy.

And as we’re at it: why not featuring Cape Town as the Garden City online?

Sorry for pulling you out of the picture for a moment here – but as we are talking websites and web design: the fact is that what we see is only one part of the story.

The important tuning happens behind the scenes with the right script – I use WP based Semiomantics Scripts only – plus the right way of editing and publishing. It’s a Science by itself, but essential to reach top rankings on search engines.

Here is a screenshot of my first little post on that brand-new website yesterday and look how it performed on Google! “Gorgeous Gardens” on Google Top 10! Ahead of 16,6 million search entries!!!

What does this mean to you as a Nursery or Flower Shop owner?

It means that your website would be visible where you want it to be seen by your visitors, readers and potential customers. At the end of the day you are running a business and your online investment into a pulling website should serve its purpose: bringing you customers that enable you to continue living your passion while giving them the best service!

Please don’t hesitate to contact me anytime and let me assist you in expressing yourself in an attractive and efficient way online.

You will simply love it…

Finally, Web Design with Passion is back on a new PC…. actually a whole new OS on 64bit. What a journey… and this with powercuts and connectivity issues… all fun but we’re getting there!

We grow through our struggles… but inbetween I just imagine myself being that happy, fat and buzzing bumble bee in my garden floating from flower to flower and living in complete bliss!

To get Web Design with Passion back on a new PC meant and still means installing each and every program from scratch. Not that this isn’t an interesting and instructive exercise nor is it the first time I do this – but it’s time-consuming and often frustrating especially when there is such a huge list to do!

However, starting out from scratch has its merits that can be compared to the annual spring clean-out: unless you are an obsessive gatherer and collector, it’s a good time to get rid of everything that’s superfluous and not absolutely necessary and becoming lean and light with lots of potential to move forward with a new and speedy lightness of being and let the creative juices flow. I’m not quite there yet as too puzzled by some mysteries noone else knew an answer to so far – but here’s my first post ‘after the storm’ and it can only get better and faster!

YEBO GOGO – this is about being a student for life!

Semiomantics XO for WordPress — Custom Magazine

Like on any live site, our test site on BitNami allows us to add themes either from the Dashboard (upload the theme’s zip file) or by pasting the theme into the themes folder in wp-contents.

Access your BitNami environment using Windows Explorer and surf to the themes folder. You will see the same folders and files structure under htdocs as you are used to when accessing your WordPress folder on a server using an FTP client.

Folders on BitNamy WP Stack

In order to add Themes, we just drop theme folders into the ‘themes’ folder as per above. As you can see, I have amongst others) added my Semiomantics XO (the ‘xo’ folder under themes). XO will serve as the parent theme of the new website. Instead however of customizing XO directly, I will create a child theme which will contain all modifications. The advantage is clear: when an update or upgrade of the theme becomes available, the parent theme can be updated without destroying the child and restarting the customization job from scratch.

A WordPress child theme consists first of all of a Folder to which we add a style-sheet.

This style-sheet contains a commented header which defines the parent theme folder as well as other optional data and it usually imports the parent theme’s style-sheet with a simple line of code (no need to copy paste the whole style-sheet). Also we will add a screenshot which will serve as a thumbnail in the Themes tab of our WP Dashboard.

Style-sheet for Child Theme

As you can see above, I am editing my files using the free PSPad which is handy to edit the various files we need to develop.

1. Add a new folder to the WP Themes folder under wp-contents/themes; name it as you like your theme to be named, in my case: yorgo12

2. Create a new file called style.css using your editor and save it into the new theme folder.

3. Edit the style.css file by adding a commented section defining:

You could add other data as some authors do, such as Author’s URI and more, but that’s not necessary.

NOTE: All the above information sits between comment tags (/*.….….*/)

Next, we import the style-sheet of the parent theme with the following line of code:

I have then added a comment to remind that you should not edit above unless you know what you do.

Your style.css file reads now similar to the following:

Save the file into the new Child Theme folder.

4. Add a Thumbnail

Usually the image represents a screenshot of the new site but it can also be a brand logo or any other image. Important: the image should be called ‘screenshot’ and be in png format to fit into WP. Use image size 300px x 225px for best display.

screenshot.png

Drop the image into the Child Theme folder.

Let’s now activate our new Child Theme from the WP Dashboard under Appearance/Themes.

What you will see is an out of the box XO when looking at the front-end of the site.

Having set the base for our custom development, we will start now to adapt the site to the needs of the hypothetical customer. Continue reading the next post.

Related posts: How to build a custom WordPress Site Semiomantics XO Transparent WordPress Drafts How to make WordPress Themes Responsive WordPress Themes and Development WordPress 3.4 Beta

We will therefore use most of our remaining daily Ycademy calls this month to go into advanced customization issues. But first we will start at the beginning by planning and formulating a project which will allow us to test code, functions and design.

Semiomantics XO Custom Theme for WordPress

For the purpose of this exercise, we will build plan and execute a hypothetical customer’s project.

The new website will be about WordPress, namely about WordPress Tips, Themes and Plugins. It’s a site for a WordPress developer and web designer.

The structure of the Website will be based on WordPress and include some static pages such as the About, Contact, Imprint and Privacy pages as well as structured dynamic content.  As the site will focus on 3 main topics, Tips, Themes and Plugins, we will build for each of these topics custom Posts and Taxonomies.

To build the new website in a test environment, we install BitNami and namely the WordPress stack (free download). BitNami creates an independent (Apache) server environment with MySQL server and installed WordPress, ready to use via our browser. If you are used to Firefox and Firebug, you will find it easy to customize your styles and designs.

Now we can access the WordPress Dashboard via the browser and the files using windows explorer.

We are ready to start working on our project. Please look forward to the next related post where we will start adding Semiomantics XO and start building our custom child theme.

Related posts: XO Photo Press WordPress Theme Elegant WordPress by Semiomantics 101 How to Customize your WordPress Typography Semiomantics XO Transparent WordPress Drafts WordPress Personal CMS and Blog

We did quite some research when creating a new website for Used Cars and Trucks for our customer Magnetic Transport Surplus in Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao, Philippines.

Just as with any other website, used cars and trucks websites want to achieve certain goals: to attract customers and potential buyers – in other words sell – and to build a reputation on the Internet and brand themselves.

ebsite Branding requires a lot of research and development, especially in terms of Logo Design and Icon Design. While there are brilliant and high-paid professionals doing exactly just that – and I have met some of the best – this demands budgets that are far out of reach for new or relatively young companies.

Accordingly, the web designer will often be asked to come up with integrated solutions that work both online and offline.

This is a service our professional Web Design South Africa Team can provide.

Before publishing this article in an earlier version on my Author Blog, I checked “Cars and Trucks Images” to capture what was currently seen there – exactly at 11:55 am:

People react more to images – visuals – than to text. While our original content remains the main issue in terms of keywords and especially tags, Google picks up our photos and pictures as well as you see on the above screenshot.

As my regular routine test, I checked where my Cars and Trucks Image landed in terms of ranking – and how fast – after I published it at at 12:30 pm!

This was the result: a smashing position 1, 2 and 3 – on 60,9 million search returns on “Cars and Trucks Websites” – Images.

This website is building a steady reputation and has daily traffic many others only dream of. What more can one ask for?

Check out MORE HERE.

If bird sanctuaries offer us tickets into the glorious theatre of Nature, Bird Sanctuary Websites are our virtual GPS.

Bird sanctuary websites offer online bird watchers information and insight about the bird life found in a specific bird park or area, opening times, entry fees, special events and perhaps membership possibilities etc, but what everyone is probably most interested in are pictures and images of birds, our favourite feathered friends.

If you have a garden that’s frequented by many different birds and you love to watch and photograph them, you may consider publishing your personal birding website or blog to share your thoughts, impressions, photos, perhaps sketches and whatever you want to include, with fellow birding afficinados. You may even invite other bird watchers to join you to gain a broader and even more interesting spectrum!

Your personal bird lover website could be designed in such an attractive way that it captures the interest of like-minded bird watchers from other parts of the country if not the world! The world of birds is truly without limits!

The Internet offers us such wonderful and affordable possibilities for individual expression today where we can create something that can be enjoyed for generations to come.

Why not pass on the wonder, joy and privilege of living in our magic world today?!

For more information please go HERE.

Related posts: How to shoot the Moon with a Point and Shoot Camera Flowers from Vouliagmeni Beach Image Editing and Post Editing Ycademy Online Seminar January 2012 Ycademy Online Seminar Photo Publishing with Evo for WordPress

For more information on Online Newspapers please go HERE where you will also be guided to a direct example.