Yesterday, I went live with the new website for Foothills Family Practice. It is a custom designed site powered by WordPress and the WP-Framework Theme.

Earlier today I discovered my site had been hacked! It was a great way to start out a Monday.

Fortunately, I back up my site each day. So, this afternoon, I was able to restore everything.

In the process, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I’d been holding off due to a conflict between my Picture of the Day application and the new jQuery library that comes with the latest version of WordPress. That being said, my home page POD is currently out of commision until I get a chance to update the code. However, at least my website is now updated with the latest and most secure software.

In the meantime, continue checking my home page for updates. Rather than appearing in the POD app, they’ll simply be appearing as “blog” posts with the most recent being at the top of the page.

Yesterday, I went live with a “soft launch” of  the redesigned Fellowship Evangelical Free Church (FEFC) website. In cooperation with Erik Chandler, FEFC Communication Director, I started this redesign in December of last year. One of the hardest parts of this process was simply gathering all the neccessary information and content in order to accurately represent an organization as large and diverse as FEFC.

Without a doubt, WordPress made this process much easier. Given its ease of use and configurability, as the content started coming together, I was able to quickly configure the custom WordPress theme I was building. This allowed us to organize the content according to Erik’s desires for an easy-to-use and asethetically pleasing layout.

WordPress’s ease of configurability has been particularly evident during the past week as Erik, Mason (his new media intern) and I have made numerous last minute changes. My expertise with WordPress themes and PHP coding has allowed me to quickly implement their requests.

All-in-all, this redesign represents a giant step forward from the website’s previous design. What’s more, we realize that our work isn’t finished. There are many more tweaks and edits that we wish to make. In addition, we also will be reworking many of the sub websites that span off of fefc.com. However, the great thing about this process is that since the site and sub website are all built on top of WordPress, we’ll be able to make our changes in a much quicker and easier fashion than afforded by many of the other content management tools out there.

Today I went live with a simple yet clean redesign of the Missio International (formerly USAffairs) website. You can check out a screencast where I introduce the site over at WenderHost.tv.

Over at WenderHost.tv I’ve posted a short screencast which highlights a recent website redesign I did for Feed Your Faith.

WordPress and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg get some nice press in today’s USA Today. (HT: Matt)

This past Friday, I set up a new website which is already proving to be a big help to my clients and a major boost to my productivity. For years, I’ve found myself repeatedly explaining the same thing to many different people. At times, I’ve considered compiling FAQs; however, the easiest and quickest explanations to grasp usually involve me showing someone the answer to a technical question. This means that my client and I have to work on coordinating our schedules, and that can sometimes take a while depending upon my client’s schedule. This dilemma helped me come up with the idea for WenderHost.tv. It’s a website where I’ll be posting screencasts (i.e. narrated videos of my computer screen) on all manner of topics. Continue Reading

As I begin this post, I feel like Garrison Keillor getting ready to report the news from Lake Wobegon except I doubt my prose will be as melodic and instead of a small mid-west town my subject will be my recent comings and going on the World Wide Web.

Given that setting, I’ll begin by saying that it has been a busy couple of months over here at the MichaelWender.com offices. I’ve been working feverishly on five new websites, completing a major upgrade on another and continuing to do maintenance on many others. Add to that my late October decision to contract with Rackspace as my hosting provider, and you have the makings of the busiest season I’ve ever experienced during my freelance career.

During this time, my writing here has languished. Just last month, there were mornings when I’d awake at 2:30 or 3 and start thinking about a new design for a website or a new way to solve a problem. My work days would span 13 or 14 hours with breaks for the gym and meals. Now that things have calmed down a bit, I’m taking some time to chronicle what I’ve been doing and where I plan to take this site in 2009. Continue Reading

FlickOut.com is an excellent example of a site that shows how WordPress can be used for much more than a blog. It features trailers and information on all the latest and upcoming movies. Their family friendly and faith inspired sections help you find and preview movies that you can take your kids to.

Dejan Cancarevic’s post about fixing a query_posts() pagination problem in WordPress was the perfect solution to a problem I encountered today. His solution will come in handy if you’re experiencing pagination problems in custom category templates. Many thanks Dejan!