I love WordPress, and I’m glad it’s been so good for so many of my clients. I like supporting my WordPress clients because they tend to be the ones who are the most keen on really using their sites to benefit their customers and grow their businesses. WP Minder came out of a desire to help those clients in a proactive way – by taking the many technical demands of owning and running a WordPress site off their plate, so to speak, so they can concentrate on running their businesses and creating great content. Most small business owners I know… Continue Reading
Launches
Two New Website Launches: PRS Septic Services and Ace Chem-Dry
Our latest launches: two Colorado company websites – one for our long-term client Portable Rental Systems, and the other for Loveland-based Ace Chem-Dry. Portable Rental Systems recently expanded into a new industry, septic cleaning and pumping. They had content related to the new field on their existing website but the work had grown to the point where they felt they needed to spin it off into a new site. We created a new website, loosely modeled on the five-year-old original, but focused entirely on content for the new niche. We removed that content from the existing website at launch. The… Continue Reading
Two new website launches
So far in September Red Kite has launched two Colorado company websites – one for the non-profit Atmosphere Conservancy, and the other for Clear Surroundings Organizing. The Atmosphere Conservancy was using an older custom WordPress theme that had begun to break as new WordPress versions were introduced. We replaced the old theme with a new custom one, including many of the same design elements but with a more modern look and feel. The site got a slideshow and project slider on the home page, but the most important change was the splitting of two long pages for News and Projects… Continue Reading
Two new WordPress sites launched
In the past two weeks Red Kite has launched two new sites: Beyond the Brochure and Reduce-My-Property-Taxes.com. Both are WordPress sites with custom themes, and both include some custom development work: Beyond the Brochure has embedded videos from Brightcove that play in a custom lightbox; Beyond the Brochure has a private section where auto dealers can login and retrieve video links or code snippets for their websites; Reduce-My-Property-Taxes.com has a PHP-based tool that retrieves and displays county tax info from a .CSV file that the client can easily maintain. Both sites were fun to design and build, since they were… Continue Reading
When a client goes above and beyond
One of my clients earlier this year had request three matched sets of HTML templates so that she could use them to revise three websites for her employer. This client was just learning HTML and had a lot of questions and a lot of requirements; and did an enormous amount of upfront research. I don’t think I’ve ever had a client that prepared before. Anyway, today she wrote me to let me know that all three sites have relaunched. She really did an awesome job with my templates, utilizing every element she requested I add; it was a lot of… Continue Reading
CSU Environmental Learning Center
The Colorado State University Environmental Learning Center came to Red Kite looking for help with a few things: A website that was standalone, not lost amid the larger site run by Warner College; A way to accept online payment for registration and membership without going off-site; A site where they could have their own unique look and feel (again, different than the department); A way to have a large number of forms more easily managed; A place where staff could view staff-only info; And most importantly, a site they could edit and add to themselves. We obliged. The new ELC… Continue Reading
Green Drake Photo
Fort Collins photographer Ralph Smith wanted a site for selling and showing off his work. We used WordPress and the commercial Shopp ecommerce plugin to create a product-based website that’s easy for him to update and grow. We used one of Ralph’s images as a background photo that resizes with the browser, and a simple slideshow on the home page to show off a few colorful images.
New Site Launch: Fort Collins Baseball Club
Fort Collins Baseball Club approached Red Kite with a need for a complete overhaul of the design and code for this well-established ASP-based site. When we examined the code, we found an enormous old Javascript-powered image rollover menu that accounted for hundreds of lines on every page. Ack! We created a new theme and built a base template containing cleaned-up versions of menu and structural code, reducing page size by up to 75% in some cases. The new simplified version of the site will make it much easier for their in-house editor to figure out what and where to make… Continue Reading