We use WordPress every day and know its ins and outs. Needless to say, we’re quite smitten with it. Here are the top 5 reasons why:

1. It’s friendly and smart. WordPress is friendly with users in just about every way – even if lots of people are making updates at the same time. You see only what you need to see on the back end (and we can make it clear where each word, picture or link needs to go so there’s no need to play guessing games).

Plus, it’s dynamic: if one change needs to be made in several places on the site, WordPress can do that automatically to save you time.

WordPress is friendly with search engines, too. It’s awesome with SEO right out of the box, and we can make it even better. (Note that by “we,” I mean “Thad” – our resident web genius.)

2. It’s customizable. A WordPress site can get as fancy (or as simple) as you want it to be as long as you’ve got a someone creating it who really knows their stuff. All fields are customized to the individual site so that even the web-shy layman can make changes. And you can make magic happen, too… Like placing a video on your site perfectly with just one little “Vimeo” number. Check this out:

3. It’s expandable. You’re never locked down. Our answer is (believe it or not), “Yes, you can make changes and add that later.” You can always build on ideas and integrate improvements big or small.

4. It’s social. WordPress integrates social media, blogs and discussions incredibly well. It can even pull comments from other websites that link to yours into your site’s feed and a good developer can make it look seamless.

5. It’s safe and sound. At its core, WordPress is secure. It’s an open source site built by the community of people who love to do this tricky web stuff and are really good at it.

(This may sound like a WordPress advertisement, but it’s really just a love letter.)

Invention has many mothers. Aside from necessity, which we get from the old saying, there is also thrift, boredom, sloth and efficiency.

I wrote my first CMS (content management system) tool in 2002 using Visual Basic 6.0. I wanted to maintain a blog, but did not want to use one of the popular blog hosting sites that used banner adds. I also wanted control over how I skinned the site, and archived the stories. I wanted to host it on my ISP’s free static hosting, and wanted control over this data should I move it to another hosting solution.

My solution was to build a series of templates that would represent portions of the blog page. This would include the header, footer, navigation, and repeating items such as the stories, and links in the navigation. The repeating items had field variables that would be populated from an Access database. No need for speed. The final HTML would be spit out into static pages, and FTPed up to the site for viewing friends and relatives. (more…)

The Web acts as a gateway to an immeasurable amount of resources and information. However, the main access point for all of these sites are a relatively small number of sites – the bottlenecks and watchdogs for Web content – search engines. So, as a Flash Developer, one of the first questions you learn to fear is, “How will this Flash content show up in search results?” Flash is, unfortunately, by and large invisible to search engines – which is a major detriment to the growth potential of the technology. And although the best answer is to provide an alternative HTML version of the content, any programmer worth his salt will go out of his way to avoid having to do repetitive labor. So, here are a few tricks we’ve picked up along the way.

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