Tacoma WordPress Developer For Hire

Just want to throw a line out there, my name is Jeromy Condon, and I am a WordPress theme and plugin developer in Tacoma, Washington.  If you or your business is looking for someone to wrangle the WordPress content management system, or develop some WordPress plugins or themes, I’m your guy.  These days, WordPress can be utilized for pretty much any type of website, ranging from the simple portfolio website, to the more involved e-commerce website.  The myths about WordPress just being blogging software are long behind us, and the advantages of having a site built with it are numerous.   I have upgraded many legacy sites now to WordPress, and my clients couldn’t be happier for it.  It is easy to use, simple to manage, and allows for ease of future expansion.

[Jeromy]

HTML 5 – The future of the web

Like it or not web developers and designers, HTML 5 is here and now is the time to learn it and start using to develop your sites and pages. I’ve been using it for a while now, and it brings some new things to the table, including a new learning curve.  As someone who cut their teeth on XHTML 1.0 Strict, the new HTML is so much more lenient it is like a breath of fresh air into my development process.  For those who haven’t started using it yet, here is my assessment of the features thus far:

1 – Ease up on that <div> tag soldier!

HTML now includes new tags, solely for the purpose of making your page outline more logical, and structured better, with less markup.  Now, rather that <div id=”header”> or <div id=”nav”> we have the tags <header> and <nav>, respectively.  Lets go through some of the more useful sectioning tags now:

1. The <header> tag.  Useful for enclosing just that, the header of your document — or section for that matter. This tag delineates the beginning of a new area of content.
2. The <nav> tag.  Here is where links are collected, and the document structure lays out your navigation.
3. The <article> tag. There is some confusion with this and the <section> tag.  Use <article> when you are enclosing content that could potentially be republished as it’s own entity.  A blog post for example.
4. The <section> tag.  This is more of a generic content enclosing mechanism.  Using a section tag says: this is an area of related content.  Treat me as such.
5. The <footer> tag.  Use this in a similar manner to the <header> tag.

2 – Have your <h1> tags your way!

Someone told me once recently, “You can’t have more than one H1 tag on a page!”.  While he was right in the old way of doing things, he is wrong with the new specification. Basically, with each section of content you define in your document, you can start a whole new hierarchy of heading tags and still be semantically correct.  The <h1> thru <h6> tags will still establish page structure if you leave them out on their own in the document, but as a best practice, use them to establish the heading of a new section of content.

3 – Self closing tags? What self closing tags?

If you’re like me, you’ve been adding the / to close all those <br />, <hr />,  and other void tags.  No more.  HTML 5 in all it’s loose goodness no longer requires it (in fact, adding the / has always been poor HTML, added only to conform to XML standards).  So don’t do it. It’s really hard.  I’ve made so many <br /> that making a <br> seems unnatural and uncomfortable. I’m learning.

That’s my beginning to HTML5 markup.  For more information please see the W3C HTML5 standards page . I’ll be adding more HTML5 stuff here soon, so check back.

[Jeromy]

The Beauty of the Grid

As I design more and more CSS layouts, I’m finding that I’m becoming quite fond of a nice, grid based system.  Not the huge bloat of code that most pre-packaged CSS grid systems generate, but a simple grid layout of 3 to 12 columns to help give content a little breathing room.  Just last week I ran across a really neat CSS grid generator that I wanted to share with you all, from Problem Labs.  My favorite thing about this particular grid generator is the flexibility of customization, and the lean base stylesheet it produces. I think I actually kept more of the styles from it than I deleted!  And coming from a generated grid that is a good thing.

[Jeromy]

New Art Site Up!

My newly redesigned jerzart.com site is up!  I’m going to try to add art to it at least once a week, so check back for new content!

Customer Service in Web Design

There are a lot of people who make web pages. Some of them good, some mediocre, some downright bad.  I sometimes hear of other developers and designers, and some of the things that their clients like and dislike about them. Really I think that the key to this, like any industry, is in the customer service. I want to be that developer nerd that is always there when you need them, that gets the job done right the first time, and gets the job done when they say they will, and in a timely manner. If you say your’re going to deliver Friday, then darn it deliver Friday.  When my clients refer me to their colleagues and friends, I want them to speak to how diligently I work,  and how easy to deal with I am.  Thats the reputation I want to build, and that is my promise to you – every current and potential customer of mine out there. I will just plain do it better than the next guy for you.

[Jeromy]