Helen Johnson

When it comes to designing and developing your own custom Wordpress theme it can be a little tricky. You have to learn how the Wordpress theme files work, while trying to make your vision of your site come to fruition. But instead of installing Wordpress on your live site and then rushing to get your design completed, try installing Wordpress locally.

By installing Wordpress locally on your computer you are able to spend as much time as you want designing, developing and tweaking your theme without the worry of breaking your live site or having visitors see a half completed design.

And the best part is that installing Wordpress locally is actually very easy to do on a Mac running OS X 10.4.x or later, and you don’t need any programming skills.

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When making this site I wanted to be able to easily manage and update it while still being able to design it exactly how I wanted. I could have just made the website with static html pages, but then I would have had to update them manually and if I wanted to blog or do quick news updates then I would have to add some additional blog software. So after some research and a few tests I found the best solution to be Wordpress.

Wordpress is much more than just blogging software; it’s a powerful CMS (content management system). The main thing that makes Wordpress different (and great!) is the ability to add “pages” just like you would add a post. These pages act like normal static html pages, but you can manage and update them through the Wordpress admin. You can even make custom templates for different pages so that they behave or look different (I’m using a different template for my portfolio pages). And you can make parent / children pages to create depth and organise your website and navigation properly.

Best of all, I have found Wordpress to be quite easy to use and versatile enough to suit my needs. You don’t really need to know html and css to use it (there are plenty of themes you can download), but if you do then there is so much you can customise and play with.

So here are my top 5 reasons to use Wordpress:

1. It’s easy to set up and use
2. It integrates blogging and CMS
3. You can customise templates, css etc as much (or as little) as you want to create your website just the way you want it
4. There are great plugins out there for you to use to help you get the most out of your Wordpress website
5. It’s free

Happy wordpress-ing!

Now that I am using a MacBook Pro for work I have had to change the way I do some things. The two main programs that I use everyday are Photoshop, for website design, and a text editor, for html/css development. While Photoshop works the same on both platforms (especially now that CS3 supports Intel Macs) the problem was finding a new text/html editor.

For the last few years I have been using EditPlus for all html and css coding. It’s a great little program and I got to know it well, but alas, it is not made for Macs. When searching for a new editor to use, I was pointed in the direction of TextMate.

While they are the same in result, they are both very different in practice. Being a Windows program, in EditPlus everything is much more visual. Menus and options are displayed in toolbars for easy access. TextMate, on the other hand, is more reliant on keyboard shortcuts and little nifty things called tab triggers. In TextMate there are no buttons to click to save your work or to open a document, you either need to use the program dropdown menu or learn the shortcuts.

I still miss EditPlus, but TextMate has been a good replacement so far and I am still learning how to get the most out of it.

I have always been a PC/Windows user, however last year I got a 17″ MacBook Pro to use for work. Previously I was using a pc desktop running Windows XP as my work machine but I wanted something more powerful. In particular I wanted a machine that could handle Photoshop better, and I wanted a notebook. At the time the MacBook Pro was the best machine (hardware wise) around.

The MacBook Pro is of course a very quick machine, it has 2 GB of ram and a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. So it does run Photoshop CS3 well, no more long freezes or waiting for files to open or save.

I would have preferred to get a 15″ MacBook Pro except that they only run a 1440 x 900 resolution, which I did not think was very good, so I went for the 17″ which has a crazy 1920 x 1200 resolution. And let me tell you, the resolution is worth it, especially when it comes to design. Being able to see a whole design when working in Photoshop is really great.

When it come to the operating system though, I couldn’t tell you which is the better. I still use Windows XP on an Asus F3Jm at home, and I do run XP on both Boot Camp and Parallels on the Mac. So far though there hasn’t been anything that has made me think that the Mac OSX is better. Sure it may be a fair bit “prettier”, but once you get past the pretty gimmicks and cute little useless programs that come pre-installed, it’s not really any better (or worse) than Windows for me.

That said I am happy with my Mac, it is a good machine, but I don’t know if I’ll stay with Mac when it comes time to upgrade to a new work machine in the future. Really what will make the decision for me is how good the hardware is. So for now I am happy to split my time between Windows and Mac, and really that’s not a bad thing for someone like me as it means I can always work comfortably in either environment.