I woke up on the right side of the bed this morning because I was feeling extremely appreciative of the things that improve my life. Hopefully you'll already have some of these things. Maybe you'll consider a purchase in your future. Weber Grills My neighbor has a Weber Grill from the 70's he never takes care of. It sits on his deck rain, shine, or snow and it starts every time. After going through a few grills during that span I decided to purchase a Weber Grill. The price is 2 or even 3 … [Read more...]
Support & Maintenance Announcement
When I first started out web designing & developing I did so with both eyes to the horizon. Each job was new and exciting. Web designing is right in my wheel house because my strength is starting new ventures. I excel at taking a products and services and marketing them online in a way that's clean and easy to understand. As time rolled on various clients needed support from time to time. I was more then happy to provide that support, most of the time at no charge. After 3 years of … [Read more...]
Things Are A Brewin’
The end of this week I hope to have a few more key project either completed or nearly completed. Its been a busy first quarter that included many challenges including malware finding its way to my server account. Not only infecting me but about 20 other sites I host. I'm been working like a dog and couldn't be happier to see my Birthday month long gone. Bring on April and spring and a new way of doing business. I have a lot of exciting changes going on here at BrianLis.com. I hope to release … [Read more...]
How to Pick a WordPress Designer
I'm making the assumption that you've already landed on the best open source CMS (Content Management System), WordPress. If you're still deciding on a CMS read why WordPress is the above the rest. The next step is picking a design or a designer. If your a do-it-yourself type of person I suggest building on the Genesis Framework. However, be forewarned Genesis is a pretty code heavy. For everyone else I suggest hiring a designer/developer. The first and most important factor in hiring a … [Read more...]
Brian Makes Time’s 2010 Top 50 Websites
One of my websites Total Pro Sports made CNN's Time Magazine's 50 Best Websites 2010! The success of this website is a credit to Anthony, the site owner. He spends a good deal of his time generating content and working social networks like Digg, Twitter, Facebook etc. But at the end of the day people can visit the site once, but its takes the right mix of content, design, and functionality to generate repeat visits. This is a great example of how important blogging is. If you look at any of … [Read more...]
Why WordPress?
Often I'm challenged on the wisdom of using WordPress an open source CMS vs. someone's proprietary CMS. The answer is pretty clear when you consider all the benefits. WordPress Is Flexible and Extendable Flexibility allows us to build sites faster, meaning more of your budget is focused on design and user experience rather than programming and debugging. The community has made it extendable, meaning that everything you can think of has already been built, which speeds up … [Read more...]
Favorite WordPress Plugins
While I have a favorite plugins page I thought I'd list out the essential plugins I use for every site I build. Featured Story: There are a number slider / image slide show galleries to choose from but none of them were easy for the end user. Other alternatives did not allow you to stylize any of the options. Featured Story does all that and its super easy to implement on your WordPress site. Google Sitemap Generator: This plugin maps out your site automatically that allows Google … [Read more...]
Adding drop shadow to a box using style.css
Here's a cool technique I use to make a drop shadow effect without making a custom image. Which not only saves on file size but its cool ;) -moz-box-shadow: 0 5px 10px #333333; box-shadow: 0 5px 10px #333333; -webkit-box-shadow: 0 5px 10px #333333; /* For IE 8 */ -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=4, Direction=135, Color='#333333')"; /* For IE 5.5 - 7 */ filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=4, Direction=135, Color='#333333'); You can … [Read more...]
WordPress “Pretty” Links
WordPress creates pages & posts like this http://brianlis.com/?p=123 Not exactly SEO friendly or even human friendly as p=123 probably doesn't mean anything to anyone. To change the way your pages are displayed inside your WP admin panel goto Settings>Permalinks. Switch the settings to custom and use the value /%postname%.htm or /%postname%.html or /%postname%/ depending on how you want your post slug or URL to be displayed. There might be SEO advantages as to the ending you use. I've … [Read more...]
WordPress robots.txt file
The robots.txt file is something that WordPress auto generates that tells search engine spiders how to index your site. The file is auto generated for you. You can find your robots.txt by just adding "robots.txt" behind your domain name. The generic WP robots.txt is this. User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://brianlis.com/sitemap.xml.gz This code tells spiders indexing your site to refer to the sitemap.xml.gz file to index your site. Hopefully your using a sitemap. If not you can … [Read more...]