Nicole Beurkens, founder of Horizons Developmental Resource Center, hired Bourn Creative to create a more dynamic and user-friendly website for the practice. Her site www.horizonsdrc.com was already a WordPress site, so we were hired to design a new custom WordPress theme and reorganize the content and flow of the website.

Read More About This Custom WordPress Theme Design Project

Recently I flew into Las Vegas for 48 hours of nothing but debauchery and open source geekery for WordCamp. (WordPress summer camp for nerds like me).

Just kidding on the debauchery; I am getting way too old for that and was in bed by 10 both nights. What a loser right? Not everyone packed it in early though, just search Twitter for #wclv and look at the time of some of those tweets.

The Hard Rock Hotel graciously gave all WordCamp attendees a fabulous room rate, which even after I upgraded to get a better view, still wound up to be less than the cost of my flight. Thanks to the Las Vegas WordCamp organizers for securing this for everyone.

This was my first WordCamp so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I regularly watch the content sessions from other WordCamps on http://wordpress.tv, but I was looking forward to meeting and hanging out with other WordPress fans like myself.

Read More About My WordCamp Las Vegas 2011 Experience

WordPress 3.3 was just released!

WordPress 3.3 is a major release with major overhauls to the user interface (UI), the media center/media uploader, and several more improvements.

I have been following the development cycle and absolutely love 3.3.

One of my favorite changes is regarding the permalink structure options.

In the past, our favorite permalink structure was to use the custom option /%postname%. This would result in a post URL of http://yourdomain.com/your-post-title which is good for users and SEO, but would cause performance problems when you get a lot of posts and pages in your database. This has been remedied in 3.3 and now is one of the options in the permalinks settings screen.

Read More About Upgrading to WordPress 3.3

WordPress allows 5 different levels of users/authors, each with different administrative capabilities and publishing rights. In order from highest level of administrative access to lowest, they are Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber.

Establishing different levels of user access is very important if you will have multiple authors writing blog articles or if you will have anyone else helping you update and maintain your WordPress site. To maintain the various WordPress, SEO, and theme settings that your or your web team has set up, very few people should be given administrator access.

Once a new user has been added to a WordPress site, their level of access can be changed at any time, by anyone with Administrator access.

Learn More About Defining Access for Different WordPress User and Author Levels

Recently we redesigned and built a custom WordPress theme for Business and Marketing Expert, Suzanne Evans. (Logo by Branding For The People.)

We used several of our latest WordPress tricks on this site and adding an image to highlight Suzanne’s responses to comments on her blog posts was one of them.

A while back Google icon Matt Cutts posted an article to his blog on how to highlight author comments to make them stand out against his site visitors’ comments.

I bookmarked the post for future reference and Suzanne’s project was the perfect one to use the technique on.

Matt’s solution was to add the following to the CSS:

Learn How To Highlight Author Comments In WordPress Using an Image

For the past two weeks, I’ve barely come up for air, and I’ve seriously neglected my social networks!

We completed 17 technical print brochures for one client, took three new WordPress sites live, created an entire set of event materials, including two 70+ page workbooks, designed two logos, designed an information product, launched a complete micro site for a large teleseminar series, and more!

The good news is that while every project doesn’t make it into our portfolio, I’ve finally updated it with some of our recent projects.

I invite you to check out some of our most recent design work here: www.bourncreative.com/design-portfolio

I’m also such a proud mama! Several of our recent Genesis WordPress theme customizations have made it into the StudioPress Showcase!

Read more about the StudioPress Showcase

Adding a simple, easily configurable slideshow to your WordPress site can be done in a matter of minutes using the WordPress plug-in WP-Cycle.

WP-Cycle allows you to upload images from your computer and display a rotating gallery on a single WordPress page or post, or site-wide (like in your header). You can also easily change the images that are displayed and also make each image a clickable link to another page on your site. We like WP-Cycle for its ease of use and the ability to easily change the images in the future.

Install the plug-in like any other (through the dashboard or via FTP), then head to the “Media” tab in the WordPress Dashboard to edit the settings and upload your images.

Before uploading any images you should crop & resize them to the same dimensions and save them in a low resolution web format.

The order of the images will be the order that you upload them. When we are editing the images for a WP-Cycle slideshow, we usually name them “Slideshow1, Slideshow2″ etc so it is easy to remember.

While you are uploading images you can also choose to make each image a clickable link and configure the display settings (Below).

Learn About Adding a Rotating Slideshow to Your WordPress Website

A recent WordPress project that we finished had to be 100% ADA compliant.

One issue that came up during the review process was the Adobe Flash based gallery plugin (Simple Viewer) that we use for the portfolio. Flash looks great but is simply not accessible for the impaired and a new solution had to be found.

After scouring the WordPress world, I came up with several potential plugins that would meet ADA standards and still look good on a site. I tested several and in the end the winner was jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries.

The plugin is simple to use, looks good, and works by extending the built-in gallery feature of WordPress. It also displays ADA compliant source code for screenreaders and is completely usable without a mouse.

I know what you may be saying right now … WordPress has a built in gallery feature?

Yes it does. WordPress has a built-in gallery feature that can be used on any post or page to display a portfolio of images. Many WordPress users do not even know this, and those who do, rarely use the feature because the way the galleries display. By default, WordPress gallery images when clicked on will open in a new “attachment page” to be viewed full size. This isn’t a good experience and it takes away from the design of the site.

Learn How to Use and Customize Your WordPress Photo Gallery with jQuery Lightbox

Dr. Meredith Hansen of Newport Beach, California hired Bourn Creative earlier this year to design her new WordPress website and blog.

Dr. Hansen’s site is a customization of the Agency Child Theme for the Genesis Framework built by StudioPress. At Bourn Creative, we love Genesis and I have to admit, Agency is one of my favorite child themes. I love the simplicity of the home page and the direct focus on three main areas.

Read More About This WordPress Theme Customization

First, I think anyone who owns a WordPress site or comments on sites that use Gravatars (the photos that show up next to comments and in author boxes etc.) should have a Gravatar account with their photo tied to their email address.

If you don’t have a free Gravatar account, head to http://gravatar.com, signup, and upload a photo.

For branding purposes, it is usually a good idea to use the same photo for your Gravatar as your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.

If you own a WordPress site, under the discussion settings, there is a set of options regarding Avatars and one is to use a custom avatar.

Learn How to Add a Custom Avatar to Your WordPress Site