For my Capstone project I chose to do a cookbook, as I’ve been accumulating recipes I’ve made on little pieces of paper in a huge stack in a bookshelf in my kitchen. I took the plunge and coded my project in PHP using the artisan framework Laravel. Laravel for PHP is like JQuery for Javascript–it’s not a language, per se, but a complex library of functions that one can hook into to create applications more quickly and securely–Laravel does some heavy lifting, but has a large learning curve, especially as it is all object-oriented. I could (and probably should) devote a whole blog to Laravel.

When landlords of older houses hear the phrase “up to code,” they shudder, because if the City singles them out to pass inspection to make sure their rental property is up to code, it often means some expensive or tedious repairs within a short timeframe. But luckily, good coding doesn’t involve expensive materials or labor (unless you’re hiring someone else to do it), but organization, logic, and attention to detail (and of course, knowledge of the language in which you’re coding). It also helps to use which language is most appropriate for the task. For instance, avoid writing a lot of styles into the HTML–save that for the CSS, which is much more powerful at styling.

The rise of content management systems, or “CMS” (as I will hereafter refer to it), has enabled many people to start webpages, particularly blogs, by themselves, without having to learn any technical knowledge or programming languages, or even design. All they have to do is provide content, and BINGO! instant gratification new website created–in many cases without even needing to set up a hosting account. It has never been so easy for a novice to set up a web page, and have it look fairly decent (thanks to templates). Why? All because of Content Management Systems.

Whole Foods was largely established by John Mackey, CEO and co-founder, mainly because he was passionate about food and eating healthy, and wanted to offer healthy eating choices to people, for he, himself, had grown up largely on TV dinners. Now, that’s a great personal perspective to come from, and usually he would be a great proponent of his own store, except that when you combine his “hippie demeanor” with extreme, right-wing libertarianism (Ayn Rand is one of his role models) you have a complete disconnect with many of the potential market who would shop at Whole Foods, which has a largely liberal, left-wing customer base.

Facebook is tremendously popular, having over 1 billion users and 55% global penetration rate as of mid 2013.1 With that exposure and audience, your business can’t afford NOT to be on Facebook, if only to increase brand awareness in a popular medium. There are nearly 700 million users on Facebook every day, with an average of 645 million weekly local business page views. Once you build an audience, your impact increases.

I’m excited to offer this WordPress User Manual to my clients, to help them edit, add, and maintain content on their pages. It is geared towards the User role of “Editor” and not Admin, so is scaled down from what it takes to create a site–it is more geared towards helping customers keep up the content of the site.

Some companies have been resisting addition of social media for marketing, but change is inexorable, and it is better to get ahead on the emergent paradigm than to rest on laurels–trust me, I’m a print designer. I know all about letting change and technology progressing and turning a blind eye until suddenly, the market has changed. It’s not pretty. “It’s easier to keep up than catch up” the old adage goes, and all of the old marketing dogs are busy learning new tricks to keep up with the business.

This blog article looks at server-side install for three different content management systems: WordPress, Drupal, and Concrete-5. The process for each CMS was the same, starting out. Create a database (this can be set up through Cpanel with MySQL databases or through PHP MyAdmin, depending on how your Cpanel is set up, security-wise). Create a user-admin for that database. Make a note of the user and password you used to create the database, and store that somewhere–you will be using it later! Download the CMS from whatever web page hosting it (i.e. drupal.org, wordpress.org.) and uncompress the zip file.