Kidazy

I completed the coding for this site, which included displaying external rss feeds for a scrolling news marquee, polls, a 5-star rating system, a dynamic top ten toys page based on the ratings system, print page and email page options, popular tags, dynamic rotating banner ads, and adsense. This site looks great and I can’t wait to see it evolve as more content is added. Visit the site →

Lose Your Muffin Top

I created this site as a community service for a weight loss program run by the Globe Gym and the Gila Community College Wellness Center in Globe Arizona. It utilized WordPress MU to create individual blogs for each participant in the program, with the ability for each participant to customize their blog layout and design. Each participant can journal about their experience in the program with their blog, and comment on other participant’s posts. Visitors may also leave messages for participants and view their weight loss success to date. This gives the site a community feeling with the hope of creating interaction and support between participants and the Globe/Miami community in which they reside.

Why You Should Use WordPress

WordPress is the perfect website building tool. If you’re looking to create a website or blog and aren’t afraid to do it yourself, you should consider using it. Here’s why…

WordPress is blogging software that’s part of the open source community–meaning it’s free. Not free, as in free beer. But free, as in freedom, or liberty to use–like free speech. This is more than just tech talk. This is a huge social movement, not to mention a movement of consciousness. If you’re not tapped into this yet, here’s what you should know.

This movement of consciousness is know as Web 2.0, and it promises to bring rise to the power of collaboration on the web. People are sharing information and allowing other people to contribute their expertise and knowledge into making products and services better. Most of this is happening free from the desire for personal wealth. Don’t get me wrong…people are still making money, but they’re just making money in different ways than before. This is exactly what WordPress does. Imagine the power of thousands of people all over the world contributing their skills to making your website awesome and they don’t expect anything in return (except maybe some good will with a link back to their site or a mention on your blog). Here’s how they do it.

Wordpress is written in PHP. This coding language is relatively easy to figure out, because 99% of the code you need is probably already written by other programmers who have generously made their code available to you, for use on your site, without charge. Most of this code is licensed under the GNU. If you haven’t already, you should take a moment and click on the GNU link and read their first page.

What this all amounts to is a very mature, open source program with a ton of functionality. Since it’s been around for a long time, and a lot of people are using it, there are many tutorials available on how to use it, as well as other bloggers who share their blogging tips, not to mention the number of developers who have donated their time to create plugins that let you do pretty much anything you can imagine.

I’ll be adding more information to get you started. So for now, take a look at the best open source program for designing your own website.