This year in preparation for Alaska Correctional Ministries(ACM) annual fundraiser coming this March 23rd, their staff worked with Tailor Web Design to launch a fresh new look for their organization’s website. ACM (Alaska Correctional Ministries) works with the Department of Corrections Chaplaincy Ministry to create and operate life-changing programs for prisoners and ex-offenders.

With ACM’s original website being build in 2005 it was the perfect time to refresh their design and add some new features. ACM’s team wanted the web design to be a bit edgy, modern and instantly portray what they do. This is accomplished with a blend of powerful imagery, semi-transparent backgrounds, a dark color pallet and a custom home page slider with custom slides and buttons.

The new website adds a blog (News & Events) feature, allowing the ACM team to keep their followers up-to-date on upcoming opportunities to serve in their organization. Additional features include:

• Donation button
• Embedded video
• Auto populating news feed
• Random populating sidebar facts
• Facebook integration
• Staff directory

ACM also plans to update their domain name in the near future to GodInPrison.org, which we believe is a great move for usability, so make sure you note the change in the near future. So it is our pleasure to present the all new, totally redesigned ACM website!

Launch Website

Oh snap, we’re at it again! We’re launching a new service called ZipyChop in March 2012 and thought we would share with you a sneak peek of the home page design. This is by far the most complex service and website we have ever created to date and has been a wonderful challenge to code. Zipy Chop will be a web service fully dedicated to converting web designs to fully functional WordPress websites built on the Genesis Framework by StudioPress for both consumers and industry partners.

Over the past year, while we love custom web design and will continue to offer this service to select clients, we are finding our team is really becoming more web developer heavy. Rather than fight this, we are embracing this opportunity to launch a service that will create jobs that our employees love, that is, coding!

The exciting thing is we have already started receiving one to two web designs per week to code through various connections we have in the industry and to be honest we are a little nervous what will happen once we start marketing So suffice to say, we think we are right one target and looking forward to a new adventure in our business.

New Site Features

Our new website will feature a fully automated web development package creator and check out cart, allowing affiliate partners and consumers to quickly choose the mark-up options and website features they need, get an instance price quote, make a secure payment and then securely upload their files directly to our server. The package creator will have four major sections:

• Mark-Up: To allow users to select items like printable style sheets and mobile compatibility.
• Javascript: Allows users to select functionality options for their website.
• WordPress: Allows users to select certain plug-ins and features they may want their WordPress website to have pre-installed.
• Hosting & Delivery: We will be offering two options. Either an archive of a clients website, which they will then need to install on their server. Or, we will offer a service to setup a stand-alone hosting account for $5.95 per month plus install and launch their website live. Nice.

When Is It Coming?

This has been a full time project for nearly three months now, so suffice to say we are close! We are just adding our final content and thoroughly testing our checkout cart prior to launching it publicly. That being said, our hope is the first week in March, but as we are learning, software development can have a mind of it’s own some days. In any case, the site will be live in March and we will make an announcement once it is live.

In the mean time, if you are (or know anyone who is) a brilliant web designer or graphic artist, but not a code head, we would love to connect with you! Our goal is to provide people like you as well as ad-agencies and direct clients the knowledge, support and capacity of a full scale web development team without the fixed cost of having one. So feel free to connect with us on our Let’s Get Started page and we can chat!

A huge thank you to our awesome team Godwinh, Liezil and Nasif for all you do, looking forward to the next chapter! And also to Joe Law over at Sundog Media, you have been the most amazing mentor I could have ever wished for. Thank you.

All the best,
Kristian Pettyjohn
Tailor Web Design / Zipy Chop

As some of you may know, I am traveling in the Philippines and currently living in Iligan City through March 2012, where our new satellite office is located. Yes, this is the very town devastated by the flash flood on December 17th, 2011 with the final death count reaching 957 and many countless still missing.

My trip has thus far proven to be eye opening, jolting even, to see how people in a developing nation pull together to help one another get back on their feet.

A few weeks back, while still in Manila, there were Red Cross workers collecting donations for the victims of the flood at the major metro rail stations. Every person in line donated their change, it was powerful to see how much everyone cared.

It became clear how much these donations are needed the next week as I crossed the bridge into Iligan City myself. Entering the city you cross the river on the one remaining bridge and instantly see the neighboring bridge which is completely collapsed.

You can see the smooth mud flows through the valley below and giant Caterpillar graders at work uncovering the earth where hundreds of homes stood just weeks before. This is where many Filipinos lost their lives as the flash flood over took their homes in the middle of the night.

Seeing the need here in Iligan and how the community has pitched in to help one another when each has so little (the average wage in Iligian City is under $1.50 and perhaps lower than $1 per hour as many people work below the legal minimum wage of 400 pesos per day, or just over $9 per day) has inspired me to contribute back to my own community in Anchorage, Alaska.

For the calendar year 2012, Tailor Web Design will be donating the design and development of one website per quarter to a local non-profit organization. The websites will be built on WordPress, a content management system allowing local volunteers to assist with updates (as no HTML code is needed in order to update and add new content to the sites) and will help to keep maintenance costs low.

It is just a small way we feel we can give back to communities around Alaska to help empower them to spread their messages. Be it raising awareness of the poverty, substance abuse or violence that happens in our own back-yards, Alaskans need to know we can provide solutions and love for those in need all around us.

I am certain I do not feel the depth of grief tonight as many around me in Iligan now do, but I am certain that we can help make a difference in Alaska and around the World today if we choose to see the problem in the first place.

Please, consider giving to Iligan Chapter of the Red Cross and donating just a little of your time to a local charity in your Alaskan community.

Iligan Donations: http://www.redcross.org.ph/donatenow

God Bless,
Kristian

Ethereal Mastering is a audio mastering and recording studio based in Albany, Oregon, just one hour South of Portland.  They are currently restructuring their business to cater to mastering clients, which basically gives an album that final polish that makes it sounds professional and radio-like.

Tailor Web Design / Zipy Designs  is working closely with Ethereal Mastering to re-brand their company with a brand new website design that will be build entirely on WordPress.  The current Ethreal website is built on a service called Weebly, which, while it was a great start for their online presence has become very restricting as they began to grow.

Wanting to portray a more professional image to their prospect clients and affiliated partner studios a custom design built on WordPress was the natural choice.  Not only will Ethereal Mastering have a more professional website image but with WordPress they now have more control over their content, allowing them to keep their content up-to-date!

We will post another blog once the site goes live so you can explore it for yourself.  Thanks for taking a look at Tailor Web Design based in Anchorage, Alaska.  If you know of any corporation, non-profit or small business that needs a new professional website design Tailor Web Design / Zipy Designs would love to help!

We really wanted four or five slides with a background image that had selectable text and the ability to add HTML on top and then style as desired with CSS. This of course would let us quickly create custom buttons and other cool add-ons on a slide to slide basis outside of the plug-in without the need for a clunky and limiting interface.

This would allow our front-end programming team the ability to quickly create a new slide, upload the background image, create the HTML and CSS and then insert it into the existing slideshow with out having to modify any PHP or Javascript (which us “Frontenders” are not to found of : )

Obviously slideshow plug-ins abound for WordPress, but astonishingly after searching for over an hour, we were not able to find a plug-in that did exactly what we wanted!  Now this would be understandable if we had just limited our search to the WordPress plugin depository, however, we were looking to utilize some of our commercial plug-ins we have licenses for, such as the well know Slideshow suite from PluginBuddy and Slidedeck from Digital Telepathy.  Yet still, no one has such a plug-in that allows you to add straight HTML in the dashboard over a background image and combine it in a slider.

Considering that most plug-ins are designed for “do-it-yourselfer” blogger with limited coding skills I should have guessed this would be the case.  So the solution?  Tailor Web Design will be creating our first plug-in!  Ok, actually it is not our first plug-in, but it will be the first plug-in that we are going to be creating for commercial release.

We will be spending the month of February really building out the features and will be putting up a small companion site with documentation and the ability to purchase the plug-in.  We have not yet set a price as we have much development to go, but we are guessing it will range from $49-79 if we really go all out or $19-29 if we keep it more basic.

Suffice to say this has gotten me thinking about all the other types of plug-ins we could be creating, so don’t be too surprised if we release another few come March.  I’ll keep everyone up-to-date on our progress and would appreciate any feedback people have about what they want in the perfect slideshow plugin for WordPress.