Great news from the WordPress community: as of version 3.1, WordPress is now Unicorn Approved.

Other new features are illustrated in this great infographic from WPMU.org:

I’m happy to announce the launch of the new website for American Sealants Inc, a leading supplier of silicone sealants and adhesives. This was a great project, the guys at ASI were (and are) some of the best clients I’ve ever had, and I got to use a lot of the shiny new tools in WordPress 3.x, including custom taxonomies and custom post types.

This is one of the best websites I’ve launched to date, thanks to the assistance of Hari Luker and Jeremy Wilson in providing professional copywriting and photography, respectively.

One of the highlights of this project was creating the little color chips that are visible in the sidebar of each individual product:

ASI provided me with samples of each of their silicone colors.

ASI provided me with a bristol board containing samples of each of the colors they supply. I scanned the board into my computer, then used the eyedropper tool in Photoshop to grab an exact color match. I then used the gradient tool to try to simulate the glossy finish of each color.

Finally, I built a custom tool from the WordPress admin panel that allows them to simply check off which colors are available for any given product. When the page is loaded, it checks which colors are available and replaces them with the visual color samples.

Color Picker Tool:

ASI can easily control which colors are available for a given product

It might not seem like much, but it’s these little touches that really separate a Studio 625 website from the rest.

Thanks for reading!

I recently redesigned the website for Tippmann Ordnance Co, a Fort Wayne-based company that manufactures and designs paintball-based military training equipment such as grenade launchers, mortar launchers, suicide bomber jackets and roadside bomb simulators.

For more information, view the completed site or my portfolio page.

Studio 625 recently collaborated with Eric Hall at EH Design & Consulting to redesign the Unity Performing Arts Foundation website. UPAF wanted a design that would appeal to a younger audience as well as potential investors. I created two designs for Eric to work from as he builds a killer WordPress site with lots of cool features like embedded video, upcoming events, featured content areas and more.

Currently the new website is on the back burner, because the Voices of Unity Youth Choir has been invited to participate and represent Fort Wayne and the USA at the 6th World Choir Games in Shaoxing, China, July 15-26, 2010. For more info, visit UPAF.com/gold

For now, you can preview the new design here.

Studio 625 launches a freshly redesigned website for Women of Grace USA, a nonprofit organization located in Northeast Indiana. Women of Grace is dedicated to worldwide missions, girls’ discipleship and Christian leadership training.

Their old website was powered by Contribute, which is great for simple websites, but they had outgrown it. Studio 625 updated the website design and integrated the new site with WordPress, so they could establish some consistency in their cross-site linking structures and have an easier time maintaining order, utilizing WordPress’s page management and heirarchy features.

We also helped to bring the various blogs and resources scattered across the internet under one roof, by pulling in RSS feeds from Women of Grace’s three blogs.

View the live site for Women of Grace →

As far as WordPress plugins go, there aren’t many that I’d be willing to pay for. Gravity Forms is a different beast altogether. It actually makes creating forms fun.

Fun. Like when you finally take off those painful shoes at the end of the day, or when you start using a hammer instead of your forehead to drive nails into the wall.

Today, I needed to send a questionnaire to a prospect (based off of this excellent article), and was about to fire up Word and create a form. Instead, I created a new form with Gravity Forms, and about 15 minutes later, here’s what I got: http://www.studio625.net/new-client-questionnaire/

It’s got drag and drop field creation, validation, conditional logic, form submission emailing & routing, and conversion tracking right out of the box. Plus lots of other stuff that I’m sure I’ll use in the future.

So yeah, if you’re on WordPress, go buy a copy of Gravity Forms. You won’t regret it.

Update:

Since I wrote this article eight months ago, I’ve used Gravity Forms on every single website I’ve deployed (hooray Developer’s License!). Nearly every website will need some kind of response form, since that’s the primary way of getting value out of a non-ecommerce website. It makes sense to use the best plugin available for the job, and there’s so much flexibility here that you shouldn’t need anything else.

Also, I’ve started using Gravity Forms to get signatures from clients. I simply put the contract into a password-protected WordPress page, embed the form at the bottom and restrict it to one submission. The  client gets a link, reviews the contract, and signs the form. Everyone gets a copy of the signature and the contract remains online for future reference. So much easier than the email > print > sign > scan > email routine that often happens when dealing with customers outside of your area.

Conclusion:

I realize this is starting to sound like an advertisement, but the level of quality in Gravity Forms in a world of poorly-supported WordPress plugins is simply amazing, which is why I can wholeheartedly say that it’s the best form plugin available.

I am pleased to unveil my new website for Studio 625.

• Read about us
• See what we do
• Check out our portfolio
• See before & after shots
• Learn about the anatomy of a professional website
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