The days and weeks (and months for that matter) have been busy here at the Artboredom offices. But you’ll hear no complaints as busy is great during this economy. I’d been working hard on two sites recently and I’ve just started another. It’s unfortunate that sometimes your personal projects/sites have to come second but that’s the reality.

Wine in the Woods

I just recently completed a couple of sites with Wine in the Woods (above) being one of them. WIW is a wine festival in Columbia, Maryland running on its 17th year. I produced the site for/through the BMCGroup. BMC, which also located closed to Columbia is having their business portfolio site redesigned by me as well. I’m working on that project right now. Lots of great opportunities!

There are a few things that I would’ve like to have had for the launch, but time was of the essence. All the information that the festival coordinators were feeding me was more important, so some of the “cool stuff” had to be kicked to the digital curb.

Monalco Marketing

This is another site I produced for BMC. I was working this and Wine in the Woods simultaneously. First time to really push myself to keep everything straight as an independent freelancer with multiple projects. There were many “learning experiences” but that’s what’s needed to get better.

Thematic Framework

Part of my learning experiences was taking on a new WordPress framework. I’ve been using either the Default theme, or K2 and breaking it down how I wanted. These sites were built on the Thematic framework. I should clarify and say they were sort-of built on Thematic. I was in such a rush at the beginning that I completely ignored the process of building the sites using child themes. Bad choice, really bad choice. Thematic makes heavy use of PHP hooks to call the elements of the framework and make the site. I’ve never used a theme that relied so heavily on that method. So I struggled. Then I looked for help on their forums and received what I thought of as sub-standard information and help. Turns out, if you actuallly build the site using a child theme, then the advice makes complete freaking sense.

Long story short, the new BMCGroup site is being constructed using the latest Thematic build and I’m doing it right; and things are MUCH smoother! Once I’ve completed the site, I’ll give a little overview of my experience.