I’ve made a couple of slight improvements to the Independence Day WordPress theme and have decided to call it version 1.5.

Q: Where are you located?
A: Right now I am in an amazing slice of American called Acadiana. I am moving back to a small town in South Georgia – just North of the Florida border where I have lived previously in a few days. I used to live in Mississippi where I co-founded a successful web-dev company.

Q: Do you just do WordPress themes?
A: The short answer is yes, custom WordPress development is what I do professionally. With that I do allot of Photoshop and consulting in addition to the css/xhtml of the custom theme itself.

Q: What is your WordPress theme development process?
A: I’ll get some general info from the client such as suggested color schemes, colors to avoid, styles or sites that the client likes, number of columns, etc. I’ll do a mock up and the client tells me what he likes, doesn’t like, wants changed, etc. I don’t mind making changes, going back to the drawing board, whatever is needed within reason.

Eventually we get to a design that gets approved. I then cut it up and build a template on a staging site. Once we agree that the test site looks good we’ll settle up and I’ll zip up the theme and send it to the client so that he can install it on his installation of WordPress.

All the WordPress themes that I create are valid xhtml with css layout assuring that my clients sites are created with the latest web standards, are highly accessible, and render correctly on the vast majority of platforms and browsers.

Q: Why WordPress?
A: WordPress is what you use when you want to create a dynamic website that is standards compliant, easy to use, and relatively simple to customize. While WordPress may not be the right solution for a huge enterprise, it is more than capable of managing the vast majority of web sites on the interweb. It seems to me that it is the right tool for the job most of the time.

Q: How long have you been doing this?
A: I have been creating custom WordPress themes for 4 years, I have been creating websites professionally, non-stop, for 16 years.

Q: What is the turn around time for a custom WordPress theme?
A: This fluctuates based on my workload, but the current timeframe is 20-30 days.

Q: Can you host my WordPress site for me?
A: Sure, and it will be hosted on the same machine that I host my own sites on so you can be assured that if there is a problem I will address it asap. I do hosting for WordPress clients for $45/year.

Q: Can help me learn WordPress?
A: Sure, I offer hourly consulting at a reasonable rate.

If you have any additional questions feel free to use the comments form below and I’ll answer and ad them to this Q&A. You Can Contact Me Here

In one of the more interesting WordPress jobs that I’ve even been involved in we created a custom WordPress theme for Inga for her new blog about “dress up games” – (Thinking) About Dress Up Games.

I had no idea that these little web games are so popular but there are hundreds ( thousands? ) of these games out there and Inga has had her other dress up games sites for a decade.

This project was a sucsess for a number of reasons, but first and for most Inga was very happy with the process and the final result.

That’s exactly what Jeff over at People You’ll See in Hell did, he gave me some time and creative freedom and we created something that we both liked. His dedicated audience has been decidedly positive as well.

For all my current clients – the backlog is just about cleared, we have just finished a number of very cool WordPress themes ( details to follow ) and are a couple days from being back on schedule.

WordPress says:

WordPress has the ability to allow post authors to assign custom fields to a post. This arbitrary extra information is known as meta-data.

You can find the Custom Field entry form near the bottom of the Create New Post section of the administration backend, but to use it you will need to hack up your WordPress theme somewhat to get the data to show up. The data itself can be just about anything – your current location, mood, etc. – I have used it in the past so a client could include a photo thumbnail in each post at a specific place in his WordPress theme that was not possible through the standard post form.

This is the code that I used to impleiment the custom thumbnail:

<?php //get article_image (custom field) ?>
<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘article_image’, true); ?>

<img src="<?php echo $image; ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" />

My suggestion is that you check out the WordPress codex about the custom field but don’t get bogged down in the examples that they show you. You can do almost anything with this data so get creative and start using the WordPress Custom Fields!

The server is very fast ( your site will load as fast as ImJTk.com ) and has been tuned specifically to run WordPress sites.

So bounce on over to my contact form and get on my calendar so that I can design you a kick ass WordPress theme and offer you free hosting until next summer.

Since I had a user of my Independence Day WordPress theme ask me to update the theme to take advantage of WordPress 2.3’s tagging feature I went ahead and did the complete over haul and I am calling it version 1.4 and it is ready to download.

Some of the things that I did this time around:

• Addded Dynamic title tag support
• Added tagging support
• Updated widget support
• Small changes to the sidebar css
• Added CSS support for the calendar widget
• Added CSS support for the tag cloud widget
• CSS tweaks for Safari compatability
• cleaned up the form code

If I haven’t gotten around to updating your favorite JTk theme, I promise to get to as soon as life permits. If you want it sooner rather than later, bribes are happily accepted.

I’ve updated the Green River WordPress theme so that it plays nicely with WordPress 2.3 – and if you are a user or a fan of my other free themes – hold your horses, I’ll get to those as well, I do have a day job, and hey, they are creative commons licensed so feel free to mod them on your own.

But I digress….

The Green River WordPress Theme has been updated to include support for tags and widgets, the files have been broken out into there respective parts, a simple footer has been added, and the code has been cleaned up a little.

You can download it here.

My custom WordPress themes are $500 per theme with $100 of that down as a deposit. I do offer discounts for clients that send me repeat business and have worked extensively with a handful clients to create multiple themes for them and their clients. In one case I have developed literally a hundred themes for a client whom I continue to work with from time to time.

This is how the development process usually goes:

I’ll get some general info from the client such as suggested color schemes, colors to avoid, styles or sites that the client likes, number of columns, etc. I’ll do a mock up and the client tells me what he likes, doesn’t like, wants changed, etc. I don’t mind making changes, going back to the drawing board, whatever is needed within reason.

Eventually we get to a design that gets approved. I then cut it up and build a template on a staging site. Once we agree that the test site looks good we’ll settle up and I’ll zip up the theme and send it to the client so that he can install it on his installation of WordPress. If a client needs assistance setting up the theme I am happy to help with that as well.

All the WordPress themes that I create are valid xhtml with css layout assuring that my clients sites are created with the latest web standards, are highly accessible, and render correctly on the vast majority of platforms and browsers.