Morning Glory House

This is a piece I’ve done about a year ago, but never wound up adding to my portfolio. The design was made for Morning Glory House which is an elderly retirement home near Kalamazoo, Michigan. They were looking for a solution to create and manage pages so they could easily update the website for their business as well as a floral themed design to match the name of their business.

For this custom wordpress theme development I used the thematic wordpress framework by Ian Stewart to cut down on cross browser inconsistencies and made a general layout.

The Site URL can be found at MGH Seniors.

It’s been a while since I posted on this site since the move over to Design Relay but as things turned out I got a little sick for a while and got really behind posting content over there. Since I got better, I took a look at my site here and realized things were way out of date and that my skill level had advanced far beyond what it previously was. I wanted to give a fresh new look to my site, one that accurately previewed my skill level. With that in mind I decided to build a new design for boylecreations.

It’s unfortunate that I didn’t have enough time to put out tutorials at Design Relay but I’ll be getting to that again very soon now that this design is out. I spent quite a bit of time on it and hand coded the theme from the ground up with photoshop and panics Coda text editor.

Now that all this is taken care of I can start posting articles here as well, and represent myself the way I’ve always wanted. I’ll be starting a new marketing campaign soon to promote boylecreations and designrelay as well as coming out with a lot more new content as well as working on some custom wordpress themes for sale.

I hope everyone enjoys the new look of things and I’m really excited to be writing again!

So I recently took a look at some of the great work at the website of designer/developer Chris Coyier CSS Tricks and I noticed he was working with a theme called Starkers. After doing a little bit of Google work and visiting the website I found that it was another naked wordpress theme. All it really has applied is some basic layout information and a reset file. It has all the base files already created like, page.php, single.php, category.php, 404.php and others.

I had recently finished developing this website with Thematic, which at some points were arguably easier then some other frameworks. But what I really noticed after I started working with Starkers was that I really liked the control that it gave me. To really understand thematic, I had to go to the thematic forums to understand how it was built to solve certain problems. It’s definitely a great framework but I really enjoyed working with Starkers for that control.

Well recently I decided that I wanted to start making the move to HTML5 and started looking for a wordpress theme using HTML5 to get started. This eventually lead me to Starkers HTML5 which is basically the same as Starkers, except that its markup is using HTML5 elements and already has the files necessary to get it functional in other browsers.

Divs have been replaced with section, article, footer, header, hgroup and more. It was a really nice find and so far its been a lot of help getting into the groove of developing wordpress themes in HTML5.

You can find the link for info on, and for the download of Starkers by Elliot Jay Starks here

and for the HTML5 version by Nathan Staines here

So recently I’ve been developing with the Thematic Framework for wordpress. I wanted to get to know some of the more popular frameworks out there and see if it could speed up my development time. Well, I’m not completely certain it decreased my development time yet, but I know for sure that I learned a lot. It really showed me just how powerful action hooks and functions.php is. I did a large percentage of the work by using action hooks and filters. Eventually I went on to writing page specific information and creating separate files for each page, so I was able to get out of using the action hooks for everything. However when I started working with jQuery to get some extra functionality out of the site, I ran into a lot of situations where elements just weren’t responding.

After doing a little research I discovered that the $ sign was causing a lot of problems because there was a jQuery conflict somewhere. I still haven’t found it yet, and at one point I wanted to use a plugin that was written only with Mootools. Again more problems. Even after calling jQuery.noConflict() I still wasn’t able to resolve the issue. The fix I used would seem kind of monotonous to some, but I actually went into the files that were being used and replaced $ with jQuery. All $ really is, is shorthand for jQuery from what I’ve read.

Well rather then go and do it all individually I actually ran a find and replace all on $ to jQuery and reloaded the files. Chances are that if you already are working with jQuery then you already know about jQuery.noConflict() and what $ does. However, if you haven’t maybe this will be of some use. It definitely was useful for me.

For those of you who’ve been following me, I’ve been designing and developing this website for just under a month now. I’m coming really close to the end now. Just when I think I’m going to be done soon, I find more to add. This is, however, a byproduct of learning. I’ve discovered new techniques and bits of information that I want to incorporate. Behind the scenes of it all I’ve been updating my sketches and design to accommodate for this.

It’s taken a while now but I think the time will have been well spent and I’m eager to add the rest of the content and all of the features that weren’t part of the original design. I’m much happier with how the end result will be and can’t wait to get working on it.

This WAS under Development. Now its done. So check it out XD

For achive purposes, I’m not deleting this post.