As with another law firm blog I recently built, the Air Safety And Law authors wanted thumbnail versions of their portrait photos to appear with the articles they published.  Instead of hacking the template files as I had done with the previous site, however, I formalized the technique and wrote a WordPress filter. Read my recent article on how this works.

Once Gregory started posting on blog.gpoelaw.com, we realized that his style of writing detailed legalese needed some additional typographic punch so we darkened the text and block justified the paragraphs for additional readability. Under the hood, I added my standard mix of plugins for SEO, Google Analytics and advanced editing.

I built the Humintell.com website in WordPress on top of Minimal, a free theme from The WordPress Theme Shop that features variable width columns and other nice enhancements. The wonderful graphic design, typography and layout is from Dean Meyers, who added some of the playful visual effects used on the site. Dean Landsman of the Landsman Communications Group integrated the various online pieces into a coherent whole, creating/editing much of the initial content.

Congratulations, Humintell! And thanks to Howard Greenstein of The Harbrooke Group for referring me to Landsman.

The EasyOffice is an exciting new entry in the world of Cloud Computing and software as a service (SaaS) for small and medium sized businesses. The CEO, Philip Meese, and I belonged to a small collective of freelance APL programmers in the early ’80s, and shared an interest in sailing and flying. He was even my upstairs neighbor for a few years. We recently reconnected at a reunion. He had a problem.

The website for his new business–low cost outsourcing of office systems, networks and applications—was unfinished; stalled. The content and visual assets were on a designer’s development server and communications with that vendor had broken down. I offered to rescue the site for a fixed fee; rebuild it in WordPress, duplicating the page hierarchy and site navigation; slapping a blog on the side to provide Philip with the tools to communicate with his customers and market.

I had fun with this one. The visual design was easy to implement so it was mostly organizing the content within WordPress’ CMS. We built the basic site in a couple of days then customized the elements and added new features over the last few weeks. The navigation bar’s drop-menus didn’t work in Internet Explorer, so that had to be redone and I had to modify the templates to show a smaller header image on the inside pages.

The site is optimized for Search Engines using the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin and features cool sliding content effects using the MooTools javascript framework.

I first met Ann a few years ago when I answered her ad in Windsurfing Magazine for a Windsurfing singles week in Bonaire. It was a wonderful vacation with get-togethers every evening and optional activities during the day if the wind was too light to sail. Bonaire, a Dutch island off the coast of Venezuela, is for windsurfers and divers; Antigua, in the northeast corner of the Caribbean, has 365 beaches and and a hot nightlife.

A few months ago, we started talking about redoing her website. She wanted a separate destination site for each island and she wanted to be able to post articles, pictures and videos. I discussed with her the various hosting options available and the features and capabilities of WordPress. We decided the best approach was for her to start blogging on a free WordPress.com account to get familiar with the process. Later, if she needed additional technology—Wordpress.com limits what you can add to a site—we could move her blogs to a hosted solution.

The result has been immensely satisfying and quite beautiful to see. Ann has taken to blogging like a reef fish takes to the warm, clear blue waters of Bonaire and posts something new just about every day. She’s found her personal voice in writing posts which makes both sites authentic and appealing. She’s learned quickly the ins and outs of using images and embedding YouTube videos. Every time I visit BonaireBliss.com or AntiguaBliss.com I find something new to make me smile and warm my heart.

Like my own site, KateNasser.com has a static home page. A custom menu provides easy navigation to other pages and sub-pages. The sidebar prominently features her contact information followed by an embedded video clip from one of her speaking engagements. Below that, is a list of her most recent posts. At the bottom of the page is a section showing post excerpts in a special category: “Hot Topics and New Bits.”

What was most fun was teaching Kate how to use YouTube to organize her video playlists and embed them in posts for her site. I also taught her how to use social media services to drive traffic to her site. She’s become an avid twitterer. You can follow her tweets at @KateNasser .

Please take a look at KateNasser.com and let us know if we did as good a job as we think we did.

— Larry

Howard proposed a robust set of features to showcase their familiarity with leading edge, social media technologies and services. The specifications called for an integrated BBs, an event manager, feature-rich videos, a Flash-powered header with a customized navigation menu tying it all together. Howard and I knew we were pushing the limits of WordPress and that’s what the client wanted to show off.

We started with a three column theme, Seashore by Sadish Bala. I added a video presentation space on top of the  sidebars and a game space below. With a bit of work, I was able to shoehorn the custom flash video the lawyers designed into the header code and replaced the generated navigation menu with a two-level structure.

The four lawyers were already blogging on other sites. This was their first opportunity, not only to write under their own brand, but to actually craft that brand as publishers and editors. As they began to post articles, they became concerned about their authorship rights —they’re IP lawyers, remember, and important ones at that! So, as we neared completion of the project, new feature requests started creeping in.

They wanted special lawyer profile pages so they could edit in additional content about themselves. These page would feature a portrait image and an expanded contact section with a download-able, virtual address card. For these special pages, I cloned the standard single page template and modified it to fetch the page author’s portrait photo from a sub directory of /wp-content. I setup custom fields for the contact information and displayed those next to the portrait image. Following that, I formatted a box to display the most recent posts by that author. Finally, I displayed whatever content they wanted to add via the post editor. Click here to see some of the code.

The head partner of the IP division liked the profile page so much that he wanted a special version just for himself that also displayed  any press articles written about him. I figured out how to accomplish that using a custom post field and some more template programming.

They also wanted to post co-authored articles. I know that there was third-party plug-in that did something like that, but at this late stage of the project, it was easier to add more template modifications to get exactly the functionality the client wanted. The solution we devised features a double portrait image, double email links and a hook to pick up the post for the special lawyer profile pages.

It’s been exciting to watch this blog progress from it’s initial launch last month. Everything we did is being used by the client and it’s all working well.

I had just returned from my honeymoon and my home office had been in disarray for months. Helping Tom promised to be more fun than doing my taxes. It was. I like New Critics and regret that I haven’t had any time in this busy year to contribute.

Tom had built New Critics on an older version of WordPress and needed to upgrade to prevent another hack. He wasn’t happy with his current hosting arrangement either and wanted to move the site to a hosting company with more services and better support.

Real Intelligence aggregates articles from other sources, including Scott Ritter’s site, ScottRitter.us. Using WordPress custom fields, I gave Jeff the ability to post both “local” and “global” articles—which appear with their original bylines, publishing dates and permalinks.

This is also a rare case where the finished project reflects my visual design. The orginal site’s styles and graphics had little in common other than projecting a sense of patriotic investigative journalism. My client had no solid feelings on how the site should look and liked every choice I presented. I employed a red-white-and-blue color scheme with crisp lines and open fonts and reused the existing graphics as best as I could. I put in a lot more Photoshop hours on this project than I typically do.

Conversation Hub was also running on a very old version of WordPress and needed an upgrade to take advantage of the newer editing and media management tools and plug-ins available. I was able to upgrade the site, lay in the design changes and install/configure the new plug-ins in plenty of time to meet the conference deadlines.