Blog
So what have I been up to lately?
Been super busy with a lot of pro-bono work, some really cool things going on, Calvary Kaleo is finished, at least my part is, and it looks a lot nicer than before, and now it is usable. Pastor Shane is pretty happy. Just did a training session with him and Reno a few days ago. They are smart guys and the session went quickly. My website class went very well, working on editing the video now and will put it on the website. I called, emailed, did two mailings and visited the area churches to let them know about this class, it was a free class for area churches. The people attending took lots of notes so I think they must have gotten something out of it. And I had fun : )
Dove's Nest Sequim
Is getting close to being done, we have some banners yet to create and they are working on getting me the paypal links to sell a few items. But you can check it out here. That is a great place to shop, eat (on Friday's), have coffee, get prayed for, meet your friends (inside Miracles Cafe) and visit with the owners, they are great people.
My "I Was Raped" Project
This is going well. A friend of mine was raped and wrote a book about forgiveness. She is a remarkable lady. We found out that lots of people are doing internet searches with the term "I was raped" and we decided to put part of her book on-line to try to help some of the people that have been attacked this way. It has been a long process but you can find her website here, www.calvaryif.org/i-was-raped. Please take a look at the site, and read what she has to say. Pray about how you could help. Her book is very good too, it is about forgiveness, not specifically about the rape.
SEO Work
Well, it worked. Sort of. Inspirations Photography came up for both searches I was testing, made it onto page one for one of the terms. So that sounds like a success. But all my changes were deleted by the owner so I can't prove my changes made the difference. Bummer. But we may get to do it again. She may make the changes herself, I have given her some advice which should take her up even higher on the list. She has quite a bit of competition though.
RevelationRadio.FM
Rocks. Listening to it now. You can click here for a popup player so you can listen too. Or go to the website. Got it all working, the schedule, banners and "On Air Now" thing. Still need some more content and the guys are working on that. The Event's section is such a great idea, but there isn't much there now.
Ovarian Cancer Facebook
The facebook account I set up for OvarianCancer-Detection.com is working well. I am still updating it at least once a day, based on the number of new news stories. It is growing into a very good resource for people who want to stay informed about the latest news on Ovarian Cancer. There aren't any posts from anyone else (almost none) but this was designed to be more of a resource than a comment area so that is cool.
CCIF Banners
I am loving doing the web banners for CCIF. I had only done a few of these before, I had done quite a bit of graphics work so the concept was pretty easy to grasp. It is a lot of fun but usually requires quite a bit of originality. Such a small space to convey so much info. The challenge is cool.
Here are some of my favorites. Click on them to view them full size.
Pastor Brent
He is still having a hard time, so please continue to pray for him. You can check the facebook page for the latest updates.
SEO Work
That stands for search engine optimization, which is a fancy term for coming up well in google. It is a quite complicated and ever-changing task to try to come up on the first page of google. I recently got to do some work for Inspirations Photography. We will see how well I did in a few weeks : ) Her website is not constructed for good seo so this is definitely a challenge.
Revelation Radio
This has been the toughest project I have taken on in awhile. This is for the radio station from Calvary Chapel Idaho Falls. The people there are wonderful and great to work for but the code is crazy. They are using microsoft streaming software and evidently not many other people are, because the tools for displaying a mms streams are incredibly limited. In addition to those problem are the mootools conflict in IE8. It seems totally illogical that a Microsoft product could cause a conflict with a Microsoft internet browser, but what is even more crazy is it Only causes a conflict in IE8. Firefox, Chrome and even Safari all handle it well.
But I did have fun modifiying an existing module to create a schedule that updates hourly. We wanted to put the broadcast schedule on the website but the entire thing is pretty long so I figured out how to show the schedule in 2 hour blocks that change every hour. I would love to say that was fun but the logic, and the code got the best of me : ) But in the end I got it. It works well. We had to use a time based script to display "On Air Now" and the schedule because their software won't stream the xml for the playlist. That means that the starting times are off a bit as they don't start exactly on the hour. But it works well.
I used two different players. They wanted an in-page player and I used a flash player for that because of the compatibility. But for the pop-up player I used the windows player as it has all the features they were looking for. But it requires a plugin for all non IE browsers.
They wanted two rotating banners, one for ads and one for church events. That also required a bit of work to find a tool that would look good and provide the needed functionality.
The site is not finalized yet but you can view it now at www.revelation-radio.net.
Terra Design - My Favorite Seattle Landscape Designer
I got the mobile version of Leanne's finalized. The idea for the mobile site was mostly for Leanne's use. She wanted the links to come up first and the portfolio to be completely functional on a cell phone and mobile device. She quite often needs to be able to access those sections when she is out on a job so I worked that out. I created TerraDesign.biz awhile ago and Leanne got a few reviews on Yelp, TerraDesign.biz comes up first on landscape design seattle.
Ovarian Cancer
I am sure learning a lot about ovarian cancer. I am doing the updates on the facebook account for OvarianCancer-Detection.com. I update the facebook daily, usually twice a day with the newest stories on the web. This website is becoming a very good resource for ladies wondering about Ovarian Cancer.
Pastor Brent Yim
Pastor Brent of Temecula Community Church has some kind of brain tumor, he is having surgery in a little over a week. This came on very suddenly. I am asking everyone to pray for him, he is a great guy. You can follow updates on his health at the facebook page someone set up for him.
Kidney and Gall Stones
We did it! I am very excited, we made it high on google for searches in the Murrieta and Temecula area. I haven't tested other nearby cities. We created special pages for both those illnesses for Health Screening of Temecula and it worked. The idea was that if someone thought they had gallstones they may want to know right away if that was the problem. At Health Screening of Temecula they can do an ultrasound scan that will show if that is the problem. And you can get in, usually, that same day, in addition, the screens are painless. They are also cheap and use no radiation. It is a brilliant solution for diagnosing kidney and gall stones and you don't have to go to the doctor. Check out our two pages on Kidney Stones and Gallstones.
Love Fellowship Christian Center
This website is finished, and I am pretty sad about that. I loved working with those guys. But you can watch Pastor Rodney live during his (every other) Tuesday night Bible Study. 7pm Central time, 5pm Pacific. I have only got to watch once but it is really good. They have a call-in program too.
WildnernessMeans.com
Just finished this website for my friend Tres. Wow, he knows a LOT about guns and shooting. He teaches clinics on long range shooting. I learned a bit from doing his website. He even teaches the math behind it all. So if you are interested in taking a class in shooting, or, if you need a brilliant instructor for a shooting class, Tres is your man. Read what a police officer had to say about the training class he went to.
Tres also teaches Wilderness Training. He knows things I had never even considered. So if you are into surviving in the wilderness, check out his webpage on survival training. If I ever get lost in the woods I am going to wish I had read what Tres had to say more completely : ) Here is one quote from Tres: "Do not do yourself the disservice of saying in your best billy-bad-Ass voice that “I’d never panic.”" That is no problem for me, panicing is what I do best.
Mr Clean
No, not the bald cleaning guy. The floor service. That website is finally finished and it came out quite nice. It is has a completely custom front page designed by one of their guys and the inside of the website is a custom design over a joomla template. This allows them to edit the website themselves and create all the employee forms they want. It should work very well for them and is a substanial upgrade in design.
PritchardWebpages.com
Yes, I know I need to update my other website (this one too for that matter). I still love the look but some of the info is a bit dated. I just realized I haven't raised my prices in 5 years or so. PritchardWebpages.com is specifically for church and ministry websites. That is what I enjoy doing the most, helping to spread the word about Jesus. That rocks. Speaking of which, have you looked at "my" How to Know God page? It is not really mine, in that I didn't write a single word. It is the standard Calvary Chapel page with Pastor Charlie Campbell's info added in. Pastor Charlie gave me permission to use his info. I have put this page on many websites now. It answers most people's questions.
Revelation Radio
Working on this site now. It is for Calvary Chapel Idaho Falls radio station. This website is in the very beginning stages and is quite a stretch. Many of the requirements require an unusual amount of coding and the layers of divs on this template are crazy. That is one of the bad things about the gantry system. I love the layout grid, but trying to place things that need to be placed in an irregular way is very difficult.
Unique Ultrasound Website
I have been doing a bit more work for Robin, she is a joy to work for and has a remarkable service. Pregnant ladies (and their families) can watch their ultrasound projected on a very large screen, it covers the wall in their comfortable screening room. She is also very good at marketing and has a facebook special running right now. If you become a fan of her facebook page you get a discount on your ultrasound.
Her website is a customized joomla template, I think I changed every graphic element. So her site uses the powerful joomla content management system with a complete custom look.
Health Screening of Temecula
We were not having the success we wanted with this website. It is a cutting edge idea, providing organ screening, but still we were looking for better results. Health Screening of Temecula is affilitated with Unique Ultrasound and was hosted on the same website. This made for a very inexpensive set up for Robin but splitting it off should improve our google rankings a bit. Having recently completed that split we also added many new pages. One of the really cool things that can be done with organ screening is scans for gall stones and kidney stones. And it can be done painlessly and quickly. The ladies are really well trained and can even show the patient the stones (or lack thereof) on the large projection screen.
We also were able to aquire another domain name "HealthScreeningOfMurrieta.com" that points to the same site. Our google rankings should improve with all this work.
This website again uses joomla with a rockettheme template. The sliding images on the top are really cool. It is the same design as Calvary Chapel Idaho Falls.
Coffee Shop Review Website
Just last night I finished a remodel on CoffeKen.com. That was a lot of fun. The site was already existing it just needed a face-lift. So I installed a rockettheme template and moved some of the items around. It required quite a bit of work though as many things needed to be tweaked. This site uses 2 sobi2 installs for listing the coffee shops and coffee roasters. Sobi2 requires quite a bit of tweaking to make it look good and the documentation is not so good. But with some persistence (and lots of css and some php sluething) I got it to come out well.
CoffeeKen.com is amazingly successful. Ken, the owner, reviews coffee shops then posts them on his website. He provides for guest reviews also. He rates not just the coffee but also everything else about the coffee shops. If you like going to coffee shops you should take a look at the site, and if your favorite coffee shop isn't listed, you can register and write a review, or you can comment on some of the reviews that are already there.
Pregnancy Resource Center Location Tool and Pro-Life Website
Recently I completed the PRO-ject LIFE website. This is a website designed to showcase an upcoming video in support of the Right to Life position. It is a very timely project due to the many attacks coming against pregnancy resource centers. PRO-ject Life also offers a resource center location tool. They have a few centers signed up already, but if you are a part of a pregnancy resource center and would like to get your center added to their list, go to their website and fill out the form. You can upload your logo and list all your services, or just add the address and phone number of your pregnancy resource center. Be sure to watch the video on the front page too. Stay tuned to PRO-ject LIFE for more exciting news when the video is complete. They have some quality people working on that project.
This project was a joy to work on and Pastor Brent is wonderful to work for. He is a man compelled to do all he can to assist pregnancy resource centers.
From a technical point of view, this website required extensive customization of a standard Joomla template and serious tweaking of sobi2. Although the documentation for sobi2 (the tool used to display and add the resource centers) is very poor the tool itself is very powerful.
Temecula Christian School Website
I have recently taken over maintaining the Temecula Christian School website. This is my first experience with Clover websites and have been disappointed. Even if a person had limited skills and limited time to devote to maintaining their website Clover offers a very limited package. This Christian School is run by Pastor Brent and as I stated above, he is a pleasure to work with. I was able to make some small changes to the site to update it a bit. A new logo and added some graphics. I also created the new logo for the school based on a design Pastor Brent supplied. That was a lot of fun.
We are looking forward to adding more photos to the website, the school is in the process of collecting more photos now. Once we have a few more photos the site will be much more effective.
From a technical point of view: I have never been excited about flash websites. Although they can do amazingly cool things with flash it is difficult to work with and not usually great for finding on search engines. Clover sites seem to fit in that mold but, at least with this template, there is nothing amazing about it. For the needs (and for the price paid) it looks like a cms website would have much better suited the school's needs.
Love Fellowship Christian Center
This project is not finished yet but is well underway. Pastor Rodney and his team are great writers, they have supplied me with the best written content I have seen. Reading about them and their church adds to the blessings of being able to work on their website. They are located outside of Birmingham, Alabama in a town called Adamsville. Their church is only about five years old but seems to be a living, healthy and growing church. It is exciting to be a part of this project. I look forward to taking this site live and to seeing how much it extends the reach of Love Fellowship Christian Center.
Technically, this is a highly customized Joomla template and involved creating many custom graphic divs so that the church could maintain the look of the site and even add the custom features themselves. It was quite a bit more work to create in a way that allows them the ability to completely maintain their own website but it will benefit them greatly. I did not design their logo, but wish I could take credit for it because it is really nice.
Ovarian Cancer - Detection . com
This is also a rewarding project. Sharon Rude, the owner of the site and Founder/President of the Early Detection Cancer Corporation is dedicated to urging ladies to be tested early for ovarian cancer. Her story can be found on the website and it has quite the impact. Sharon is a great lady, and wonderful to work with. This website is growing rapidly as Sharon is adding resources often. Sharon has a golf tournament planned for the Central Coast of California that will be a fund-raiser for the work being done on Ovarian Cancer. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of her work, and the work to educate more women on early detection of ovarian cancer you can contact Sharon and soon you will be able to make a donation through her site.
There are many helpful links on the OvarianCancer-detection.com website, and you can view the celebritys in support also. Sharon is working very hard on this project.
From a technical point of view this site was pretty easy to set up. Sharon and I had discussed this site for quite awhile before beginning the work so the structure was well understood and this is a stock Joomla template design that works well for what Sharon had in mind. Having recently completed designing matching letterhead and business cards for Sharon I look forward to seeing them in action.
Calvary Chapel Idaho Falls
This website has been a lot of fun to create. It is a big improvement on their old website and features their ministries well. Working under the direction of Tammy Brown the website is complete now. It features a large section on Tammy's personal ministry, Healed & Set Free which is an amazing ministry for hurting ladies. This modified Joomla template features a large rotating banner area that can be on any page. For Calvary Chapel Idaho Falls we put it only on the front page and on the main Healed & Set Free page, each with different banners. Creating the banners for both places is a great exercise of creativity and keeps the website looking fresh.
Pastor Rick's messages are put on the website one to two days after he gives them, usually on Monday and Thursday. You can watch the video of his messages or listen to the video. Pastor Rick is a great Bible teacher and you can view his messages on the front page of calvaryif.org or on the Audio/Video page or on the Archived Video page or on the individual books of the Bible such as Exodus or Matthew.
The video and audio files are stored on archive.org and someday we hope to do live webcasting of the services.
Behind the scenes this website uses and slightly modified Joomla template and many, many customized divs and graphics. We use the latest JW player and the "glow" skin for the videos which are encoded to m4v format to be compatible with cell phones. I was using a highly customized version of "Preachit" to manage the media for the books of the Bible but due to the display options chosen it became easier to simply write the code to add the twice weekly media.
Their Christian School website is in the process of being reconstructed but I am not involved in that.
