During my social media break a few weeks ago I did a little design work. One of my projects was to makeover CMFA.us – a site I designed last year. This is a great organization that was started to help those who served in our military, who suffered injuries or disabilities. Several of these participants have competed in the Paralympic Games in recent years.

I originally built the site to give them an online presence and a way to easily post news articles, related to their cause and also give them a way to keep their participants informed of upcoming activities and such. The new site builds on that functionality and updates the look and feel of the site to bring it up to date. I also setup a Facebook page for them with a custom welcome landing screen with some key features of the site. Below are a few screenshots:

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It’s been a long time since I’ve done any paid gigs but I love all the stuff you can do with WordPress these days. There’s a little bit of a learning curve, but when you have companies like WooThemes out there, you don’t really have to sweat the hard stuff, you can simply focus on the overall design, which has always been more my thing anyway. Simply put, WordPress makes it possible for hacks like me to make a go of it again, in an industry that’s constantly changing.

Have you ever wished you had the skill-set to do something but every time you make the attempt, it turns out to be nothing short of a steaming pile of poo? Yeah, that’s me right now. I desperately wish to be a creative, but for some reason it just doesn’t come naturally for me and that bugs me. I see some of the most amazing creations and designs from some of you guys and it blows me away. It makes me want to just sit down and design something. Anything. But due to my lack of knowledge and proper methodology, I just find myself staring at a blank artboard with nothing to show for my passion.

I’ve always been a hack. I admit to that. I’ve done some web design and a little graphic design over the years – nothing I’m really proud of. I get the opportunity to design a lot of email templates for our clients at work and have even done some UI’s (that’s “user interfaces” for my friends in Rio Linda). I can put bits and pieces together to make something work, but when it comes to designing something from scratch that’s super cool – that’s where my mind dumps me off at the nearest exit.

So this week I was tasked with designing a new UI. I’m excited about it, but today was just one of those days where nothing came to me and I couldn’t make anything work. I know the look I’m going for when I see it, but when I try to replicate it, it’s just blah. So hopefully something will come together next week. Maybe I just need to take my mind off of it for awhile. I’ve been doing quite a bit of design stuff lately, so maybe I’ve just reached my limit.

How about you guys? Has there ever been something you’ve wanted to do but it just doesn’t come natural when you try to do it?

Any other fail whale’s in the audience?

I recently redesigned my wife’s blog, based off a new theme by my favorite WordPress template developers, WooThemes. The theme I selected has some nifty little java-script to display your latest Twitter update. Since Carrie isn’t a Twitter user, and likely isn’t going to become one anytime soon, I tried to find a way to replace this with her Facebook status updates.

This wasn’t easy, and maybe even isn’t the best way to go about this, I don’t know, but thought I’d share what I did for anyone else out there that may want to do the same thing. It’s easy to display your tweets in Facebook, but the reverse? Not so much. I don’t know why Facebook feels the need to prevent or hide this functionality. Anyways, here’s how I replaced the Twitter feed with Facebook’s status update, for anyone who may be interested.

Find the Facebook status feed – this is the difficult part since FB has since buried it with recent updates.

• Log on to Facebook and open the notifications window (bottom right)
• Click the ‘See All’ link
• Click the ‘Your Notifications’ RSS link (bottom right)
• You should be presented with your notifications RSS link

This will give you a feed link, but not the correct one, you’ll need hack it up quite a bit for it to work.

• Copy the link into a text editor and replace ‘notifications.php?id\’ with ‘status.php?id=’
• Replace all references to ‘\x3d” & “\x26’ in the link with a simple ‘=’ sign.
• This should give you a nice clean rss link to your Facebook status updates
• For example, this was my wife’s original and edited feed link.
• Original: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id\x3d522510056\x26viewer\x3d522510056\x26key\x3d6a3c02d8a5\x26format\x3drss20
• Altered: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=516456579&viewer=516456579&key=eb395bd3ab&format=rss20

If you only need the Facebook status feed, you can stop there and simply add your feed to FeedBurner or one of many different services out there, or just use the WordPress plugin to import your feed to your blog. I had to get a little more creative though to import the Facebook status to Twitter, and then to the Twitter feature on the blog.

Sign up for an RSS2twitter account here: http://rss2twitter.com

• You’ll need to authorize RSS2twitter for Twitter use, but once that’s complete, simply copy your edited Facebook feed link as a new feed in RSS2twitter.
• Edit the feed to display just the description, otherwise you may get some replicated text. Choose your update time, etc and save the feed, making sure to select your Twitter from the account drop down list.
• Once complete, you should see your Facebook status automatically imported to Twitter on the update schedule you selected in the previous step.

This solved my issue, now my wife’s blog displays her Facebook status as a Twitter update. Like I said, maybe not the best solution, but it worked for me so thought I’d share it with you.

You can see the final product on my wife’s blog, mommyhoodadventures.com. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below.

I decided on a whim to re-do Carrie’s website, just for fun. WooThemes (my favorite WordPress template designers) released a new theme this week which got the wheels churning, so this is what I ended up with. It was fun little project and I’m finding the more I dabble in PHP (code speak for my non-techie friends), the more I learn. I’m still horrifically slow and I’m probably doing things the hard way, but the cool part is that I’m starting to figure it out and find what code controls what and so on.

This design features several different plugins, like the header rotator at the top to keep the site looking fresh. It also has a Flickr plugin to automatically load images from our account. I wish I could claim all the artwork, but alas, I don’t gotz da skillz. So all the imagery is ‘tweaked’ or put together from multiple sources to create the look of the site. I also had fun designing the little footer at the bottom to add a few personal elements for Carrie. She doesn’t really use Twitter, so I’ve been trying to find a way to replace that element with her Facebook status updates, but have been unsuccessful. You can do the opposite (post from Twitter to Facebook), so I may just have to convince Carrie to use Twitter, I don’t see that conversation going well, lol. The framework is all WooThemes, but this was probably the most I’ve hacked up a theme before, especially theirs, because they’re nearly perfect out of the box.

I don’t know why I mess around with our blogs so much, neither one of us are heavy bloggers and we don’t have a lot of readers, but I just thought it’d be fun to do and a great learning experience, and it was! Yeah, I know, I need to get a life. Ha. Anyways, head on over to MommyhoodAdventures.com and take a look and leave Carrie some comment love.

I work at a small software company called, L1 Technology, the IT/Development side of the larger business, Level One. They’re a central leasing office for apartment communities all over the country. Part of my job is designing email templates that are used to respond to prospective residents. Below are some of my designs. Most are based heavily on the look of their property website because *as of yet* we have nothing in place to really get a grasp of what they’re wanting. So 9 times out of 10 I just try to replicate their website as best I can to make it work for us.

I love this aspect of my job. I’ve learned so much over the last year or so about design, coding and html. Working with email templates is an interesting thing. You can’t really use stylesheets or link to a css file. In order for it to render correctly in various browsers and email clients you have to code it inline, which is archaic technology… very 90′s-ish if you will. Took awhile to figure that out and still learning how to code for certain clients like Gmail that like to replace your styles with their own.

You’ll notice that the same elements are present in almost every template… this is a requirement on our end to generate reply traffic from prospective residents and provide them with key links to availability and such. Just thought I’d drop a few of the ones I’ve done on here to add a little more to the “portfolio” section.

Ok, so my “creative streaks” come in phases. I can go weeks/months without ever having a desire to dabble in design. Then all the sudden I get the itch and it’s all I think about. Problem is, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. My techniques are limited, skill set lackluster and time non-existent these days. I’m not a designer, I’m just a dabbler and a designer wannabe. If I had it to do over again, I would’ve started sooner and have studied graphic design in college. I feel so far behind the 8-ball compared to some of my creative friends and acquaintances I’ve met via social networking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not throwing a pity party for myself, just venting, because that’s what blogs are for, right?

So over the last week I’ve been bit by the design bug and have been working on redesigning this site. I really wanted to learn more about WordPress in the process and how to hack up themes to customize them to my liking. I’ve got a few projects in the works in the next few weeks, so thought I’d better get some practice in. I’m discovering that most of it involves knowing your way around CSS… something I’m slowly getting a “little” better at. My biggest problem is that it takes me WAY TOO long to do anything. I’m horrifically slow, but part of that is due to my anal retentiveness and the perfectionist in me. I could never do this for a living, I know that much, but I do enjoy it.

I’ve discovered over time that I’ve got the ability to see what looks good from a design standpoint. I’m a patchwork designer. I can piece things together to come up with a concept, I just lack the ability to originate it. Frustrating, but for what I do on a daily basis at work and what I do @LifePointSC it’s all I really need to do. Still trying to stretch myself though and by surrounding myself with some amazing talent and with all the free resources available online, I’ve got lots of opportunities to learn.

It’s been a long time since I’ve designed a website, but since some friends of mine (Ben & Jim) turned me on to WordPress, it’s given me a little motivation to do a few projects again. My first real project (still underway) was for a brother of a friend at work, Jeff Snover. He was injured in a accident several years back and as a result became involved in the US Paralympic Team. Because of their participation there, he and several others started an organization called Champions Made From Adversity (CMFA). Their mission is to advance the lives of those with physical disabilities through sport and leisure activities.

This has been a fun project and still have quite a bit of work to do, but it’s given me the opportunity to get back in the swing of things. Thanks to the boys over at WooThemes, I can leave the hardcore design to the big boys and focus more on tweaking the site to meet their needs and also give them a great tool to be able manage their own content going forward.

http://www.cmfa.us