Well I really have gone round the houses with this blog over the last few months.  We have changed domain name, changed designs a few times and now we are back here on the original domain name that we started with, but with a new design.  Let me explain all about it!

First of all I have had a blogging conflict for the last few months.  I have started writing more and more blog articles about WordPress and the Web design and development work that I have been doing.  That in itself is not a problem, but penny4them.com was followed by a lot of friends and family that were not in the slightest interested in WordPress or web development.  Therefore I have decided that I am going to use this a more of a personal blog about me rather than things that are too WordPressy or web developmentish (not sure whether they are words but hey ho!).  I am going to develop the Equal Design blog in order to publish any techy posts that I write.

So why this design?  You are a web designer for goodness sake?  Well that is true, a web designer that doesn’t design their own website?  The thing is, is that I just haven’t got time to design my own site as I am too busy with other projects – teaching and Equal Design.  So I stumbled across this theme from youare.com the other day and really liked it.  Nice and simple with good design features and enables me to do all the things that I want to on my blog.  So after a dummy local install to test the features I have decided to go live with it.

Content Management Systems have taken off massively in the last 2 – 3 years.  I suppose the reason for this is that more and more stuff is being published on the web, but the number of people that have ability to do this is far smaller than the amount of information or number of people that want to publish stuff.

So why does a content management system help?  Well the idea behind a content management system is that the user need know nothing about publishing on the web, in fact all they need to know is how to type in order to publish their information.  Alright, I agree there are one or two things that they need to know such as creating links, adding images etc. but all this is done far easier in a CMS than when coding from scratch.  The content management system allows anyone to manage content and publish it on the web.

So what software can be used in order to produce a content management system.  There are several systems out their but for me I always use WordPress.  Many people would ask why, since WordPress is traditionally a blogging software, and maybe they are right, but until someone can convince me otherwise I am sticking with WordPress.  I use WordPress because:

Its easy to grasp:  you can really learn the basics of writing pages and posts in a matter of days

• Pages:  WordPress was one of the first ‘blogging’ platforms to use pages which allows you to write pages in a parent, child method
• Include a blog: even though you are using WordPress as a CMS, many sites these days will want a ‘News’ section and therefore why not take advantage of what WordPress was built for – blogging which is what a news section basically is
• Custom Fields:  WordPress’ custom fields enable me to display content in a way that other systems don’t.  By using custom field with both pages and posts I can display information other than what I write or display in the content of a post or page.  They provide real flexibility within WordPress.

I will write more about Custom Fields in an up and coming article, so watch this space.

When using WordPress as a content management system it is best to keep your static content as pages.  By this I mean pages that are written about a particular topic and do not need a data stamp and time that they were written.  The page content itself may well change but the actual page itself stays in the same place all the time.  Also when writing pages think about what structure/navigation you are going to want to use.  You will need to take advantage of WordPress’ parent and child pages in order to get WordPress to automatically add pages that you create to your sites navigation.  For example you may have a page of a site called ‘Services’ if you were a Security firm for example.  Your company may well offer several services and therefore you would write pages that are child pages to the services page that outline all the services that you offer.  With the correct coding in your template files you can allow WordPress to list all the child pages of the Services page when you are viewing the Services page.  This makes navigation for your visitors much easier and it also makes publish pages easier as nothing needs to be added apart from the new page in order to get the page to appear on the site.

In terms of getting a News section on the site I would recommend that you create a ‘Home’ page and then set that to display as your WordPress homepage in the settings section.  Then create News page and set that to display as your blog posts in the settings section of the dashboard.  That way you can still use categories etc when writing news as well as tags.

I hope that has given you a little insight into using WordPress as a content management system and please check back for more posts in the coming weeks.  You can view some of the site that I have created using WordPress as a CMS in the Portfolio of Equal Design.

After weeks and weeks of ideas, discussion, designing and also debate we have finally launched the new Equal Design website which went live today.  The site is very innovative and off course uses WordPress as its back end in order to power everything.

We wanted to freshen up the look of our site.  It is amazing just how quick websites can become a little dated in their look as the last Equal Design site only went live at the end of July in 2008.  We wanted a site that also would enable us to manage all of our projects, invoices and themes online rather than having to constantly email things backward and forward between me and Matt all the time.

This called for an admin only area that is hidden from the outside world through the if user is logged in function.  This allows us to post in certain categories for admin use and they are not displayed unless you are logged in.  I am sure that this will prove very beneficial in the long term when working on different projects.

So there it is then, the New Equal Design website.  Please feel free to leave your comments on what you think, I just hope that you all like it.

Penny4Them started out in the summer of 2006 as a small site where I stored some photographs of friends and family so others could see what was up to.  Since then it developed into a proper blog, using WordPress as the platform for publishing. Today I am launching Penny4Them version 2.

I have had the previous design (which is still available in Old Penny4Them Archives) since January of 2007 and therefore I thought that it was about time that it took on a new look.  The original design was based on the Fasttrack theme by Sadish, and having learnt so much about WordPress and CSS in the last few years I thought that I should have a custom design.  I have created many sites over the last 6 months working with Matt Shepherd as Equal Design, however I wanted something that was a little different from what we had created before.  I wanted something a little more ‘Grungy’.

After about 4 weeks of research and testing different designs in Fireworks and Photoshop, I give you Penny4Them version 2.  This will include all the usual stuff that I have been posting about over the last 18 months or so, however there is going to be more.  I am adding a specific WordPress section (available as a link at the top of the blog) where I intend to share some of the things that I have learnt about this great publishing platform over the years.  I often look at the WordPress Forums in order to try and help others out and I find myself helping the same problems over and over again.  Therefore this should tackle some of those issues.

So there it is – Penny4Them version 2.  I am sure that it will evolve little bits and bobs over time, adding this and that and taking bits away to get it just right.  However I am pleased with it.  What do you think?  Your feedback and comments as always are welcome.

P.S. the old posts and comments are all still available and working on the old site in the Old Penny4Them archives, just in case you are wondering what has happened to them all!