Word­Press is a pop­u­lar, open-source, Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem built by hun­dreds of com­mu­nity vol­un­teers around the world. Although, I’ve been devel­op­ing Word­Press Themes for years, I finally got around to releas­ing my first Theme for pub­lic use. I call it MEM Core which is short for “Middle Ear Media Core” because I plan on creating many child Themes for it. Each child Theme will inherit the functionality of MEM Core, and will modify, or add to it in different ways.

MEM Core is a pro­fes­sional, cus­tomiz­able Theme with a clean look and respon­sive design. It works great on mobile devices as well as desktops and laptops. The Theme includes optional page layouts, customizable background, customizable header image, customizable navigation menu, and multiple widget support in the sidebar and the footer, and much more.

Follow the link below for more details, a demo, and of course to download the Theme for your own use.

MEM Core Theme

Terracotta half-life is a tropical funk band from Marquette Michigan that I founded over five years ago. I created the first website for the band in 2005. It was a static site built with HTML and formatted the “old” way with lots of nested tables and inline styles. It was a real pain to update. Over the years, its been evolving with the band and now looks like this.

The site has gone through several revisions since 2005. It was given a proper style sheet, the layout was changed several times, and of course the actual content was modified (many times).

In 2008, the site went through a major overhaul with a transition to a WordPress based site. Built with PHP and using a MySQL database, it was now a dynamic site with blogging functionality and an RSS feed. However, I used a generic WordPress Theme (slightly modified) for this version of the site and was never completely satisfied.

Now, its been completely redesigned again. This time with a new WordPress Theme that I custom designed. Although the site has been completely redesigned, my goal was to maintain a similar feel. So the logo, background image, and color scheme have essentially remained the same.

The site is now more user friendly with a horizontal navigation bar just under the logo as well as at the bottom of every page. This should make it much easier to navigate the site.

Also, the blog has been moved to the main page instead of being separated into different categories and buried in the site somewhere. This should make it more interesting to visitors immediately upon arrival.

You can now subscribe to the blog via email as well as RSS feed.

The Photo gallery is now broken into separate years to make photo browsing easier.

Of course there were a lot of other small changes made that I won’t go into, but let me just say that I am much more satisfied with the site now.

terracottahalflife.com

In case you haven’t heard, WordPress is a personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL. In other words, it allows your site to be a dynamic, database-driven organism. So rather than having a couple static HTML pages sitting there getting dusty, your site can be built with PHP modules which can be combined in many different ways to dynamically generate the HTML page seen in your browser. I’ll get into why that is so important in future posts.

WordPress is licensed under the GPL and is an Open Source project. As an Open Source project, WordPress has managed to generate a huge community of users and developers. This has helped it grow from a small project in 2003 to a massively popular blogging platform in 2005 and now to a full blown Content Management System.

I’ve only been designing for WordPress for about one year, but in that time, I’ve seen drastic improvements as new versions were released. As I write this, version 2.8.4 is the latest and greatest. As a custom WordPress Theme developer, I have come to be intimately familiar with most of it’s features. I’ll be talking about WordPress a lot so check back soon or better yet, grab the RSS feed or subscribe by Email.

Wow, it’s been almost two years since the last major site redesign here at Middle Ear Media. A lot has happened since then. It might take a couple days to get everything in order, but I just couldn’t wait any longer.

I went with a whole new look for the site, but I plan on bringing the old look back with an Optional-Theme button where the user can select which Theme is used to display the site.

For the new site, I’m using WordPress as the CMS. I designed a custom WordPress Theme for Middle EAR Media that makes use of many built-in features of WordPress. You can now conduct a search of the entire site, subscribe via RSS or email, leave comments, and much more.

As you can see, the new site has a blog section where I’ll be posting all kinds of stuff related to the projects I’m working on as well as web design in general. So hang tight while I work out the kinks and check back soon.