HTML Tables to CSS conversion

Posted on May 31, 2007
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Convert that HTML Table layout to a CSS XHTML layout

Seems to be a common request of me in recent days the conversion of tabled layouts to CSS. In the last week I’ve converted plenty of static HTML Table layout sites to the more lean and mean CSS type layout and one thing I always tell people is that if you are coming from a static type situation or even ASP, JSP, PHP, etc you can preserve your links and site structure with the use of Joomla and sometimes with the use of WordPress providing provision is setup in advance for such things.

Now what this means is in the event you have a site with great PR and indexing in Google and decide to move to a more dynamic database driven setup like Joomla you can keep your page rank and your existing link structure without risking loss of PR or rank. How, cleverly and if you ask me for examples I’ve got plenty.

I’m not a Realtor, I’m a web designer

Posted on May 31, 2007
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I got a few emails over on my Brokers Edge blog located at http://www.thebrokersedge.com/blogs/jared/ and just so you know I’m not a Realtor. I do real estate templates for Joomla, WordPress, Blogger and even OpenRealty which was the first place of my original real estate designs.

Now I do build and design other things like corporate identity packages, letter heads and other template related products but ALL LOGO work gets outsourced.

I just thought I’d mention that.

Free WordPress 2.2 Realtor Themes

Posted on May 31, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

Again, in the past 8 months I’ve logged a few hundred themes downloads dating back to WordPress 2.0.3 and of those downloads for Free WordPress themes only two came from this blog.

I’m moving all blog templates for WordPress that are real estate related to The Brokers Edge and the rest will either be here, one of my 3 forums, or on my CSS Design Magic site.

Drop me an email if you have a question.

WordPress bbPress matching themes

Posted on May 31, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

Time to revisit this subject. Today I was going through a redesign and upgrade project involving WordPress 2.2 and the bbPress theme and its a seriously lengthy endeavor. But I’m going to distribute twin themes on The Brokers Edge for such scenarios.

Is this a bad idea?
Visit The Brokers Edge to find our more.

osCMax osCommerce Templates

Posted on May 29, 2007
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osCMax osCommerce Template Foundations

Looking through my inventory late last night to clean up my auto archive drive I discovered I had created 5 different versions of osCMax template foundation masters ranging from all CSS layouts (heavily modified content tpl files) to variable width and and column layout masters. After testing them at about 1AM this morning on my demo domain with a few flavors of osCommerce, I was able to get all 5 versions of template masters working as drop in solutions. Now CRELoaded, which I also have master layouts for, I did not test as of yet. But if you are a web designer and or site owner this foundation set will be a beautiful little resource that can save you a spank of money.

Custom osCommerce and osCMax Templates for $30?

When you consider the costs of the average template for osCMax or osCommerce is in the neighborhood of $140 then compare it to the price of customization which can quickly reach $1,500, $30 almost sounds like a typo. Well its not and here is why.

To begin with, my colleagues in education and I have been working on the Rapid Template Design Series with every spare moment available in order to have it ready for the printers and in college bookstores by Fall Semester 2007. osCommerce has never been part of the objective in teaching template design for largely because of the hard coded nature that osCommerce requires for creating custom designs. In fact many of the variant ideas we had for the RTDS have been dropped because the concern for showing bias has always been forthright on our minds. So that lead up to a proposition in the structure of the RTDS in general. You can go almost anywhere on the internet and find some sort of template kit for some application that may be what you are looking for, but none of them have the same academic agenda from its conception as the RTDS does.

The beautiful thing about the entire RTD Series is that ANY instructor (college, high school, university, or trade school) can publish supplemental materials using the publishing features in the series and simply add them into the bundled syllabus expanding the course almost effortlessly without the need for costly alternatives.

When you consider that our competitors product from the current educational industry publishers, instructors are pretty much grid locked into a particular format for books and learning material. I mean the alternative is what? Write a book, build a course, maybe make a few power point slide shows? Not very exciting but none the less required for any unique application to a course. With the RTDS this is moot as our system has core components necessary for expanding or adding on to the course materials in what the industry simply calls supplementals.

So, I’m going to release this template foundation for osCommerce and osCMax with guides as a supplemental release. Price? $30, and will be the only supplemental in our series that is actually downloadable and not physical delivery as the RTDS is. So I’m calling this supplemental “Open Source Commerce Builder” RTDS supplemental

What does the Open Source Commerce Builder include?

It includes the 5 master template foundations for osCMax, a small collection of code snippets, a PDF manual, 38+ minutes of FLASH SWF or FLV format tutorials, and an assortment of other elements needed for the creation of a custom theme / template for osCommerce or osCMax without having to pay a designer like me a thousand dollars for your design.

How do I get it?

So simple I feel embarrassed for not using a PayPal button or order form. But this site is my personal NON business blog not one of my commerce sites so simply send $30 to sales – at – jaredritesigns.com (it says Jared’sDesigns) and delivery will be via download link sent to the email address I receive in the PayPal notification. Delivery date will be June 4th unless you don’t care about the audio quality of the tutorials then I’ll email it the following day. My audio person only does freelance on weekends for designers and animators so I’ll have to wait until he can clean up the voice overs for me. If this isn’t important, I’ll send the following day.

Why wait until the following day to send? In the years I’ve been building templates for template clubs I’ve learned that all of them wait a day to deliver digital goods like these largely because when accepting PayPal its a good idea to make certain verification has been provided.

Memorial Day 2007

Posted on May 28, 2007
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Thanks to every soldier and every other person in service to freedom. We thank you for the freedoms we enjoy.

Rapid Template Design Series

Posted on May 27, 2007
Filed Under Products | 1 Comment

Rapid Template Design Kit Renamed

Today I opened my mail sitting on the counter for three days and discovered that one of the colleges that use my RTDK (Rapid Template Design Kit) requests that I change the name.

An unusual request but valid none the less as I’ve long considered it myself, so here is the skinny on the pending updates. The reason behind the request is that it should reflect its use in various courses that use the kit such as PhotoShop for Web Masters, Introduction to Web Design, Graphics Design Games and Web, etc. All of these are non credit courses.

So after meeting briefly with the other three instructors who were responsible for the development of the instructional materials, we agreed we would change the name to Rapid Template Design Series. I wanted to name it Photoshop Design Series but there is a book with that title and a company that publishes a magazine also uses that name as well. I don’t want to tangle with big publishers so Rapid Template Design Series is what its now called.

A Little History of the RTDK

For those who don’t recall or may just be tuning in especially you who are educators and instructors, here is where the RTDK came from. The RTDK in part, started out back in 2003 as a small collection of tutorials on designing templates for a product called OpenRealty that I offered free of charge on my old site jaredritesigns.com. Just shy of 1,800 copies in total were downloaded while it was available. Then…

In 2004 I was contracted to convert an existing K12 school districts static html website to a CMS which we chose Mambo after comparing it to more complex solutions available at the time. Part of our agreement was to provide three years tech support and a collection of instructional videos for the staff whom will use Mambo to administer the schools departments. Departments included for example physical education, math, english, the library and so on. Mambo CMS was a sure win because of its categories and sections way of organizing content. This became the second part of the mix.

Then the template kit materials became available in November 2004 and sold in the schools book store as nothing more than a shrink wrapped set of instructional papers, all pre punched for a three ring binder, two CD’s, the class syllabus, and a collection of assignments for use in a NON credit class on web design. Who the course was marketed to isn’t important, but the first kit was the precursor to our more lofty idea. Maintaining support materials for the half dozen schools that use this little instructional packet is quite simple as we only update the label on the cover per semester and update the versions of any tool included on the CD.

After NON students begin to buy the materials after having read my posts on my community college teachers blog, a few of us figured it might be a good idea for an online product. The materials in the bookstore are not self contained meaning that they require instruction. So the plan then was to provide instruction by video with an instructor to accompany the materials. A full blown course compliment was born.

Where is the template design kit?

Well if you attend colleges in Western Washington State you can likely get it in the book store. They DON’T DO mail order and if you need the course ASAP as a college then Packet Publishers and Distributors will have it in their catalog this summer. TCP will have it and so will Amazon in November of this year if deadlines are met. The online ordering version will be available on the site http://www.templatedesignkit.com this late summer and will be ranging in price from $9.95 to $149.95 depending on series (print, web, etc). Schools and colleges are discounted 70% on all series above the intro series and resellers and web site owners who sell the material will receive a generous price break as well. This is a physical delivery product because of weight, volume and number of computer files included with the printed guides.

If you have questions, contact me but please keep in mind that the current version does not have an ISBN as of yet so if you are from a school or college requiring ISBN numbers for your catalogs you should list it as supplemental materials until our application returns from the government. All materials are copyright 2004 – 2007.

Converting HTML to CSS

Posted on May 25, 2007
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I get asked this with more frequency in the last few months so until I can get the tutorial outlined I’ll extend the offer to anyone wanting this done to do any HTML page conversion to CSS $80 with limitations being applied only to complex menu’s and generator type apps.

So if you have an HTML site and you want to make it light, fast, validated, and current, send me the link and I’ll quote you accordingly.

Every conversion I do not only includes the documentation of the conversion but a style guide for the typography since we remove all of the inline styling code elements placed there by some generators like FrontPage.

Building Templates for CRELoaded

Posted on May 25, 2007
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CRELoaded is one of the loaded flavors of osCommerce and is by far the most common commercial variants.

Templates for this application can be either difficult or simple depending on your approach. So what I did is created a post that articulates the fundamentals of good design for osCommerce, CRELoaded and osCMax to be published today after I get the supporting images completed.

Be sure to check back.

WordPress 2.2 Theme Conversion

Posted on May 24, 2007
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Updating WordPress broke my theme

If you have recently updated your WordPress to 2.2 you may have noticed that your columns are mis aligned or simply fall below your content.

This is a very common issue and I’ve fixed literally dozens of these in recent days and figured I’d write a summary on this.

To begin with, MANY existing WordPress themes on the market free or otherwise are usually some sort of modification of other themes. In fact those themes are modifications of the original themes which you could essentially trace back like a genealogy or family tree.

The most common thing I encounter when fixing the layouts is the issue of MARGINS which breaks the layout. With the new widgets integration people are finding the layouts breaking. So I’m going to take a quick break and assemble some demo files for this article so you can see the steps.

……… Update to follow

keep looking »