I was asked by Jim of the Harper Corporation to create a separate website to assist with fundraising efforts to compete the long waited park.

The site’s creative design uses similar features of the the Town of Stanley’s website and is built on WordPress. The Harper Park website features park news, fundraising events, park sponsors. A calendar and blog will allow the city to give residents updates on the park progress and can be used for ongoing park information once the park opens fall 2012.  Thanks to the Harper’s and Jim at the Harper Corporation who have a tremendous philanthropic heart for Stanley and many communities in our area.

I was approached by Chris who is the Booster’s Webmaster to design a new site specifically for the FMHS Band. What a nice challenge. The band uses the site for upcoming events, fundraisers, forms, volunteer sign up, sell band wearables, and more. It’s amazing how much the site is viewed/used which shows how much the band students and parents are involved in the program.

Of course I used WordPress to run the site. The header features a slideshow of the different band group pictures at the high school.  The site has a calendar, and several pages of forms, links, sponsors, news in the form of blog posts, band store and more. The  band also heavily uses social media like Facebook groups and Twitter. Chris does a nice job keeping the site up to date with events, news and more.

The FMHS Band was recently invited to march in the world famous Dublin Ireland St Patricks Day Parade March 2013. The Band wanted a separate site for fundraising efforts, feature sponsors, and information about the trip. I created a separate install of WordPress using the same Band URL but with the tag of Dollars for Dublin. The second site is sure to help communicate and help raise funds for the March 2013 trip. Good luck to the FMHS Band on their progress towards a fun and exciting trip.

There was just something different ticking in my head when I created the Dancing with the Stars Fort Mill (DWTSFM) website. I was excited to take on creating a separate website for the Fort Mill School District Athletic Board.

First of all, what a great idea for a fundraiser. The FMSDAB asked 6 local celebrities to dance at a one night gala dance event and raise money for middle school sports. The money is raised by selling tickets for the gala and dancers raising donations as part of their final score prior to the event.

The DWTSFM website is built on the self-hosted WordPress software and it is a separate install of the software than the main Fort Mill Athletics website I created and maintain for the FMSDAB. To create the separate WordPress install, I elected to use the main site FortMillAthletics.org URL and adding dancingwiththestars for the sites address instead of using a new domain name. The DWTSFM website has many different features and a unique design. I wanted to make sure the website  had the look and elegant feel of ballroom dancing.

The front page is a single column design with dark rich colors that I hope you agree give it the ballroom dancing look, but sells the event.  This website is full of goodies. I had to figure out how to promote each dancer and raise money by individual dancer online donations and event ticket sales.

I used the NextGen Gallery to create the front page thumbs. I know some of you might be saying “over kill” but I know the plugin well and it’s easy to use. I added the NGG Custom Fields plugin to redirect the thumbnail link to the appropriate post URL. Each dancer has there own post category for their bio, donation request, status and dancing instruction/practice updates.  I used the Donation Can plugin to raise money for each dancer. The plugin shows an online status of money raised by each dancer.  I used WP Event Ticketing plugin to sell the Gala tickets.

I have really enjoyed taking on this website project and I hope you agree the design concept is unique and catches the flavor of the fundraiser while appropriately marketing its cause.

Fort Mill Boy Scout Troop 250 has a new website design by yours truly. The site is built on WordPress using the self hosted version of WordPress. The site’s front page is the blog or Troop news page since most of the website visitors are looking for the lastest news or event. The blogs main page automatically shows an excerpt of the post with a featured image thumbnail.

The second most visited page for the Troop is the calendar page with the Troop’s years worth of activities. I used  KieranOShea Calendar plugin which is an easy calendar for most users to update and has upcoming events sidebar widgets.

My son Camden took on the role as the Troop’s Webmaster to update the website regularly. I was surprised but pleased he volunteered for the role and learned the basics of posting to WordPress quickly.I guess watching me create websites and the countless hours I spend updating many local non profit websites rubbed off on him.

There are 2 other chartered scout groups at Grace Church. They are Cub Scout Pack 250 and Crew 250. I created and have been updating the Pack’s website for several years and decided to change the design of the Pack’s website to look similar to the new Troop’s website. Recently The Charter Organization Rep Ray Scott asked me to create a new Crew 250 site. The basic design again mirrors the Troop’s website and is up and running but still needs site content that will be added soon.

Check out the 3 new sites and let me know what you think!

I have been using Pixelmator 2. For the low initial investment, it has turned out to be an awesome tool for graphics and photo editing. I find the background “magic eraser” tool is quick and easy. Text features have improved with version 2 compared to version 1.6 which was somewhat plain (boring) and limiting.

I have been testing Coda and Expresso version 2 for HTML and CSS coding. The “jury” is still out on which tool I like better. Text Wrangler has worked great (can’t beat the price) but it would be nice to have a full featured software tool especially for CSS style sheets. Any suggestions or opinions?

I listened to a webinar the other day by Chris Smith of Inman News @InmanNext. Inman Next released a video of the “I Suck at Twitter” webinar that anyone can watch. Although the webinar was developmed for real estate professionals, the webinar is helpful for anyone wanting to learn more about and how to use Twitter.

Click to view the webinar “I Suck At Twitter Please Help Me” video.

Facebook announced this week a new feature called Timeline. FB promotes Timeline as a new kind of profile. Timeline is your collection of all the top photos, posts and apps that tell your story on one page. According to Facebook, Timeline will be rolled out in the next few weeks.

I cant wait to spend hours fibe tuning my Timeline….how about you? More at http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline.

If you have not heard, Google +, Google’s social networking platform is now open to the public. Before today you had to receive an invite from a Google+ beta tester to try and use Google Plus.  So if you are ready to try another social media society, give Google+ a try and get your free account.

WordPress is used on more than 58 million sites according to WordPress.com stats  . I made the choice to use WordPress as the base website platform for my clients and I. Its seems over 58 million agree with me. Well, maybe that comment is pushing it a bit since WordPress.com stats data is really promoting the popularity of WordPress.com and WordPress.org and not me.

What’s the difference between WordPress (.com) and (.org)? Here is my simple answer,

WordPress.com is a free blog site offered by WordPress (run by Automattic). You simply register with WordPress.com and begin setting up your blog site on their hosting service with certain limitations to the use of WordPress. To use more than 3 gigs of storage space and to use other features like using your own domain name, there is a fee.

The name WordPress.org is used to identify a free open source software program called WordPress. WordPress began as a blogging platform but has evolved over the years as a content management system (CMS) software platform to run great looking, informative, dynamic websites. The current download counter shows over 7,767,000 copies of the current version of WordPress software has been downloaded.

Creating websites using CMS software is very popular and makes most sense when trying to maintain a dynamic (constantly changing) website. WordPress software once setup, is very easy to use. You simply log in to an administration dashboard which gives you the ability to create or change website content. The administration screens for writing blog posts or pages are similar to several common document editors. I chose WordPress after trying other CMS website software platforms primary for its ease of use.

Let me know if you are interested in starting or converting you website to run on WordPress.