Currently, these designs have not been placed on anyone’s website. They were creative exercises for myself. However, they are available for purchase if you may be interested. Simply contact me with a request and we can work out the details.

The Homestead Design

The Homestead Design

The Concept

A nice home with a lush green lawn, using the lawn area as the backdrop of the website content. Using a combination of bright colors with earth tones and textures creates a lively, rich and inviting website. The dark textured background allows the design of the site and the content to stand out on the page!

Suitable Uses

Ideally suited home related websites and services, such as:

• real estate agents
• mortgage loan officers / lenders
• home repair services

The Thompson Design

The Thomspon Design

The Concept

Light, clean and sharp. While this design seems to embody these design elements, it still projects both a friendly and professional look and feel.

Suitable Uses

This website is very versatile and can be used for a wide variety of websites. While the design is shown with the example of a real estate website, this can be adapted to virtually any professional service.

Special Notes

When used as a real estate website, pay special attention to the ever-present property search bar located just under the header image.

The Vineyard Design

The Vineyard Design

The Concept

With this stylish and contemporary design, the dark background makes the white body just pop off the screen. The Vineyard was designed to employ a vertical navigation system that hovers over an attractive header image. The use of white on black, with varied shades of gray give great contrast, yet bring the entire site together in a very nice way. This is not your typical black and white look!

Suitable Uses

Again, this one is using real estate as an example, but this can easily be adapted to virtually any website need.

Special Notes

While the image shown here makes the website design appear narrow, this is a bit misleading. The design itself spreads across 1000 pixels, making for a nice wide area to work in. The site design was intentionally a bit longer to allow me to showcase both a home search and featured home within the left sidebar typically sought in a real estate design.

So there you have it. 3 new designs by your’s truly.  Any thoughts?

However, this website is no longer about mortgages. As a matter of fact, I am still finding the voice of this website, and therefore I do not have the same target nor focus to reach that target. I am not seeking to get the #1 ranking for any particular search, so my postings will not be a focused as before.

Its not that I don’t have something to say. I do, but I have a few outlets for those thoughts. I have a Wordpress.com account for my work postings and a family website for family related information (sorry, no links to that one… it’s a private site for family / friends only). Since this site is based on my name, this may eventually become a personal blog. I am just not sure how much I want to put out there from a personal perspective.

So hopefully, there will be quality posts, but on a less frequent basis. I hope you’ll hang around and say hi from time to time. But if not, I certainly understand.

Ed

To keep the communication flowing I have chosen to use Feedburner, a service by Google that allows people to subscribe to your RSS feed, and you can have the latest posts emailed to your subscribers. Its a great service and is free to use. The downside though is that you never know who is subscribed to your feed, and you can’t just send an email out to your “list” this way.

My fear in using Feedburner is that if you psots frequently and regularly, you can overwhelm your readers with emails every day. Some people don’t like that. So I am going to begin offering a monthly digest that people can subscribe to as well. To the right side of the site, you will see a number of ways you can stay connected. Simply click on the “Monthly Digests” subscription link to get registered. I will still use Feedburner to handle the subscription and only use the RSS feed for that category.

Now I just have to remember to create the monthly digest!

As long as TwitterFeed continues to update my posts on a regular basis, I will stick with this. I am not a big fan of adding plugin after plugin as it seems to make your Wordpress website bloated and slows things down. Besides, just one more thing to go wrong!

So in short, I am using TwitterFeed to publish my posts from this website to my Twitter account. So, if you want to keep up, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me at http://www.twitter.com/ednailor

This time, I am updating both Twitter and Facebook with posts from my website, so let’s cross fingers that it works!

So once you get your design complete, then you must begin checking all the different browsers to see which ones you need to fix your design in. Most notorious is Internet Explorer 6, which if you are still using this browser, by all means please UPDATE! Not only does IE6 butcher most designs, it is also a very insecure browser!

Anyway, once the design is set, you start checking it against as many browsers as you can. The problem is that it can’t always do that easily. For example, if you want to check your design in all the IE browsers, you have to pull a lot of tricks out of the hat. You see, you can’t run multiple versions of IE on your computer as the latest version replaces the prior one. You can run virtual pcs and install different versions that way, or modify the code of the IE versions to allow them to work side by side. However, these are not the most optimal way of doing things.

Another option is using an online service such as BrowserShots, where your webpage is rendered on multiple servers and different browsers. This can take a long time to get the results, in some cases cost money and you normally get only an image, not the live site. What if there was something better? There is!

I just downloaded the Microsoft Expression Web 3 SuperPreview program. This very cool program compares your website using IE 6, 7 and 8 as well as Firefox. You can see the different browsers side by side, one above another and the coolest view… layered over each other! You can also click on different sections to find out size discrepancies and more. Its a very cool program that seems to have a lot of promise.

It does not compare every browser out there, but since the different versions of IE account for roughly 2/3 of the browsers used online and Firefox uses about half of what’s left, you will cover the vast majority of users. From what I have seen, there was a free version of it that only compared IE versions. I think that is still available, but you will need to search Google to see. I have a paid copy that includes other browsers like Firefox, and it also comes as part of Expression Web 3, Microsoft’s version of Adobe’s Dreamweaver.

I encourage you to check it out if you are a designer / developer. It may make your life a bit better!

If you have been using a plugin for your Wordpress website that updates Twitter, Facebook and even MySpace… and actually works well, please let me know!

Looks like 2010 is going to be a great year! I am looking forward to this very interesting and exciting opportunity and expect that I will both learn and contribute much in this role!