Phew! Without further adieu, I am finally pleased to announce the launch of my newly updated website.

One of the primary factors for redesigning the website was to migrate it to a content management system (CMS). Since it’s a relatively small site, I chose to go with the open source platform of WordPress. Using a CMS should, in theory, make it far easier to maintain.

It’s been a lot of fun (and sometimes frustrating) working with WordPress and the various plugins and if fun is a factor then you can always count on being more involved. Any time I had to update the previous website design, which was entirely static, it was so arduous, that I just kept putting it off. Now I’m even planning new projects and topics just so I have an excuse to add content to the site.

I thought I’d take a few moments to summarize all the tools I used or incorporated into the website. This being my first endeavor into a full blown, customized WordPress website, I often knew how I wanted the website to behave but didn’t know how to achieve it. Through trial and error and slowly refined search terms, I eventually found all the tools that helped me achieve my goals. Hopefully, the list below will help you bypass some of the frustration I experienced being a newbie.

WordPress Tools

• WordPress: An open-source, community-supported publishing platform.
• WordPress Codex: Resource for all things WordPress.
• Sandbox Theme: Simple WP theme that makes it easy to integrate your own style and layout designs.
• Google SiteMap Generator: WP plugin that automatically generates a Google Sitemap, which helps to better position your website’s search results ranking.
• Slickr: WP plugin that creates an AJAX Flickr gallery. I did not incorporate the gallery component, though it does make managing, accessing, and resizing images from your Flickr photo sets a breeze.
• Lightbox: WP plugin for presenting enlargements of your images in a layer over the active page.
• Add Lightbox: Paired with Lightbox, it automaticaly scopes your lightbox image sets to the given entry (or post.)
• cforms: WP plugin for creating contact forms. It has a great admin interface, comes preloaded with several templates, and is also completely customizable.
• aStickyPostOrderER: WP plugin that lets you completely customize the order in which your posts appear. If chronological or alphabetical aren’t sufficient, this is a great tool. I used it on my work portfolio so I could control the order by significance.
• Force Category Template: WP plugin that allows you to create custom templates for each category. I used this to create separate headers for all my category-driven pages, including work, blog, and photos.
• Get Custom Field Values: WP plugin, which takes advantage of WordPress’ custom fields by letting you control their placement and appearance. I used this for non-category pages to create custom headers such as résumé, about, contact, and all the error and search pages.
• Get Error Message There: WP plugin that creates inline error messages. I use this for error handling on the comments forms.
• Google Video Plugin: WP plugin that lets you places Google Videos on your website.
• WP Cache: WP plugin that helps your website load more quickly. Rather than calling on the database each time to generate a page, this plugin creates static copies, which accounts for the faster load time.

Web Design Tools

• Image Link: Script that creates a hover effect for image links. Works well but requires a bit of finesse with Internet Explorer.
• Veerle’s Horizontal Navigation: Veerle’s Blog features great tutorials on graphic and web design, one of which helped me create the top navigation of this website using a fairly straightforward CSS technique.
• Sticky Footer: CSS styling that makes sure that regardless of the length of your content, the footer will always appear at the bottom of the page.
• IE7 Google Code: Script that makes IE7 behave like a standards-compliant browser. Most important feature for me is handling of transparent PNG images, which Internet Explorer does not currently support.
• Yahoo! UI Library: The YUI Library is a customizable foundation for creating standards-based websites. Best feature is the Reset CSS, which clears out all browser formatting on HTML tags and lets you define them yourself.

Software

• Adobe Photoshop: Graphic design software used to create design comps and photo and graphic elements for the website. (Mac and PC)
• Adobe Illustrator: Graphic design software used to create logo and graphic elements for the website. (Mac and PC)
• TextMate: The best ever text editor. Great tool for hand coding XHTML and CSS markup. (Mac)
• Transmit: FTP software that offers a simple, straightforward interface for managing local and server files. (Mac)
• Xscope: A really handy tool for “measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts.” (Mac)
• OmniOutliner: List making application. It really came in handy for managing and prioritizing tasks for the website. (Mac)
• Flock: This web browser offers a really simple and convenient tool for uploading images to Flickr. (Mac and PC)

Services

• Jumpline: Web hosting company with the best customer service EVER!
• Flickr: I use Flickr to host all of the images posted to my blog and photo sets. The convenience is in the management tools offered both by Flickr and through WordPress plugins.