Over the past year, I’ve had some great experiences working with friends who were messing around with WordPress, but just needed me to help them get everything configured and customized. These weren’t folks who needed a highly customized website solution, but folks who needed their sites to fool people into thinking that they cost a fortune to build.

The How

Since these were people who were open to getting their hands dirty with a little simple technology, we had a great time working together either via Skype or in person updating the site together, changing a color here, adding an image there, adding a page here, changing the text there, etc. Since WordPress makes it so easy to get a website live, we could just play around and have fun with it until we ended up with what my friends wanted to see, all the while cracking silly jokes about all sorts of sundry (but family-friendly, of course) topics.

The End

At the end of our little WordPress jam session, my friends ended up with a website that would have cost potentially thousands of dollars if they had paid for a custom design built from the ground-up. Of course, sometimes fully-custom is absolutely the way to go. But many other times, it’s just a waste of money, since you can always expand onto your website as your business/hobby grows.

Since these types of collaborations are such a blast and have such awesome results, I figured that I’d build into my business as a service for those looking for a website along with the ability to update and customize it without having to hire an expensive designer every time they need to change a phone number or modify the sidebar.

I’ve added on to the package access to a library of WordPress how-to videos so you don’t have to remember everything we’ve gone over, and slapped on a price tag of $325.

Anyhow, this is probably one of my favorite things that I do in my business, so if what I’m describing sounds good to you, you can learn more at the official page for this package known as “Launch and Learn.”

Until next time…

Inspired by the supa-talented Portland-based designer Deb Pang Davis‘s recent blog post What I Learned this Week #19 2010, I’ve decided to follow suit with my own list of things I learned, last week, but just about WordPress (otherwise we’d be here all month, as I obviously know very little and each week is a completely new adventure in all areas of my life).

1) The Easiest Way to Add a Thumbnail Photo Gallery to your Posts and Pages

While I’ve always been a big fan of the unbelievable WordPress image gallery plugin NextGen, if I want a simpler (but more limited) solution, the Shadowbox JS plugin is an awesome alternative.

For those of you who don’t know, WordPress gives you the option of creating a thumbnail gallery of images right on your blog post or page. However, the default behavior of this gallery is that upon clicking on each thumbnail, a full-size version of the image appears in your browser’s main window, taking the user away from your post or page. Pretty lame in my opinion.

Shadowbox JS makes it so that upon clicking a thumbnail, a dark but transparent overlay with the full-size version of your image appears. Inside this overlay area are navigation buttons so you can flip through your full-size images very easily. This way users quickly see the full-size version of your image without being taken off of the current page.

Get the plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shadowbox-js/

2) WordPress 3.0′s Custom Post Types Rule.

I’m going to keep this as un-technical as possible, but make a long story short, Custom Post Types allow you to have content on your site that’s not just limited to standard WordPress pages or blog posts. Basically, this makes WordPress a much more powerful and flexible content management system that will also be ultimately much easier for non-technical folks to update.

For example, you could have special movie review pages, photo feature pages, podcast episode pages, etc. Each of these special content types can be on specially-formatted pages separate from your blog posts or pages. And that’s just scraping the tip of the iceberg…

However, setting up custom post types on your WordPress site is likely to take some mucking around with PHP code, so definitely be aware of that.

Here’s the best article on the topic that I’ve seen yet: http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/04/29/custom-post-types-in-wordpress

3) The Magic Fields Plugin also Rules.

For a long time, this plugin has basically done what the newly-introduced Custom Post Types functionality is doing but using a different technological approach. However what this plugin brings to the table is setting up a much nicer user interface for a non-technical user to update their custom pages and posts.

For example, I am currently working on a project where the client needs to create highly-configurable mini-sites which are not blog posts or pages. In fact, each and every mini-site needs to have its own unique header graphics, page backgrounds, and sidebar content.

Magic Fields allows me to set their site up in a way that the admin section for each mini-site comes complete with an additional form at the bottom of the page that’s super-easy to use, thereby allowing my client to establish a totally custom look and feel for each individual mini-site.

At this time, the developers of Magic Fields are updating the plugin to integrate with WordPress 3.0′s Custom Post Types.

Check out the plugin for yourself here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/magic-fields/

4) I’m Learning Way More Than I Thought

As I write this post, I’m having a difficult time keeping it brief, and also having to leave out a good amount of information. Working full-time as a self-employed WordPress and UI developer forces me to squeeze an insane amount of new information into my brain on a daily basis…and for that I’m very grateful.

Thankfully, I have been blessed with even more clients than when I started, but over the past couple of months I’ve been putting in as much time as I could between projects to complete this site, which hopefully gives a good picture of what I do, and embodies the passion I have for what I do.

Of course, like all websites, this one is a work in progress. And that’s the beauty of doing things online.

I will get “all Zen” on everyone for a moment and remind them that just like nothing in this world is exempt from change, a website needs to be a living and breathing organism constantly changing to reflect all of the changes going on in one’s business as well as one’s view of the world. In fact, one of my favorite bloggers, Johnny B. Truant writes a great article about this very topic.

I could easily obsess about many details of this site (not to mention any site out there) that could still use fine-tuning, but for the moment, it’s a gigantic improvement over what I had before, so rather than delay the replacement of a site that was a lot crappier than this one, I’ve chosen to just launch this site as it is, and start reaping the rewards of a vastly improved online presence now instead of waiting for perfection to come at some later date.

The fun part is sitting back and watching how things evolve, and then getting to sculpt this site to accommodate that evolution.

In the meantime, if you have any feedback about the launch of the official (if not 100% perfect) Magnetic Webworks website, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below, or via my nifty little contact page.

Until next time…