I used the premium theme from Organic Themes called “Restaurant” and customized to reflect the brand personality for the LadyBug Café.

The Restaurant Theme features an elegant design and layout perfectly suited for restaurants, cafe’s, coffee and tea shops or other businesses within the food related industry. The background and theme colors can easily be changed within the options to match your brand, and give the theme a completely different appearance.

The Restaurant Theme features a food and drink menu template, making it easy to add and display your menu items. In addition, the theme includes multiple homepage layout options, an RSS subscribe widget and a variety of other great theme options.

1. BackWPup or WP-DB-backup
   Because it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when … so be prepared and have your work backed up. Either of these plugins provides an easy solution to back up your database daily, weekly, or monthly. I recommend setting up a separate email account with google and send your scheduled back ups to it so you know you always have a copy of your blog or site.
2. Akismet
   A very powerful spam filter for all  your post comments.
3. All In One SEO Pack
   Wordpress is known for it’s natural search engine findability. Add this plugin for page titles, descriptions and key words, set your permalinks, and enter your update services. Sit back and expect some visitors.
4. Sharedaddy or AddToAny
   These are the little sharing icons that appear at the bottom of your posts and/or pages so your visitors can easily share to Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc and also email the link.
5. Contact Form 7
   You should never display your email address in plain text on your website. This is a target for spammers that can be easily found. Instead you Contact Form 7 to create contact forms for your visitors to reach you and protect your email address.
6. Fancy Box for WordPress or NextGEN Gallery
   Both of these provide the wow factor to the photos. When clicked the photo jumps forward in a fancy box. NextGEN Gallery is better if you have many photos in galleries and albums to organize and manage. If you just have a few photos in your posts and pages Fancy Box works just fine.
7. WordPress Stats
   If you have every had a site at wordpress.com they provide stats. This plug provides stat to your self hosted site so you see the traffic to your site.
8. WPtouch
   Really great plugin, no set up required, just install and it converts your entire site to be touch pad friendly for viewing on iPad or iPhone.
9. wp-Typography
   If you care about typography and I do.
10. Social Profiles Widget
    Several icon styles to choose from in this easy to use social networking (Facebook, Twitter and many more) subscribe and feed buttons for your header, footer or sidebar

And here is a list of optional plugins my clients have enjoyed but not necessarily for everyone.

1. Snow Storm
   We don’t have to be so serious all the time. Snow Storm adds a festive falling snow to your site during the winter holiday season.

The number one question my web clients would ask is “how can I do my own updates and keep my content current on my website?”. Well of course WordPress is the most affordable and obvious solution and comes with a very user friendly content management system right out of the box.

The second most popular question has been “how can I get a higher rating on search engines?”. WordPress is EXTREMELY friendly with search engines and many of the premium themes offered have rigorous search engine optimization built in for every single page. Many of my clients have had great results.

For these reasons and many others I have decided to specialize in WordPress sites again in 2012. So if you are looking for an affordable web solution for your business or personal website please be sure to contact me. I’ll be posting pricing and theme options in the next week or so, as well as hosting solutions and all inclusive start up packages.

2011 started with a flurry of interior design projects which included www.accentsforliving.com, www.gillaninteriors.com, www.royalshinepainting.ca and www.splashdesignconsulting.com.

I was especially proud to work as a WordPress special agent for RKD Web Studios, a prominent Guelph web company. Projects included www.rockwoodfc.com, www.stillme.ca, www.osbie.on.ca/blog and www.realagriculture.com.

Some of my redesign of my existing clients included www.mammaliandaily.com and www.shecametoplay.com by Canadian fiction writer Susan Alexander, www.kerstinstinson.com, www.woodencounter.com, www.ladybugcafe.ca/blog, www.catherintammaro.com, www.dsmdisplay.com, www.amazonsportswear.ca, www.aquanautpoolservices.com and of course my own site www.nextpagepublishing.com.

New and local projects, of which I am especially proud, I really love to support local business in every possible way, include www.rufflesandtwine.ca, www.rockwoodtv.com, thepumpkinpatch.ca, www.tomcarrollgallery.com, and www.kingmasonryyard.com

Coming up in 2012 I have OC Communications, Align Technologies, and RegenTech, all from Rockwood, and Foothills Vet Services from Acton.

Thank you one and all and I wish you all continued success in 2012!

If you have purchased the Lion OS for one computer and did not save the install files and now want to create an install disc for other computers there’s a little trick to do that. Email me for info on how to install Lion on more than one computer.

Once Lion is up and roaring, here are some of my favorite new features:

iCloud stores your music, photos, documents, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices. Automatic, effortless, and seamless so if you buy some music or rent a movie on itunes it will automatically be available for you to play on all of you devices, your computer, your laptop, your iPhone, iPad and even Apple TV. I really love the security of storing my address book and email accounts on a remote server so now matter what happens to my devices my personal info, photos, music are always safe. If you want to learn more about iCloud click here to watch the promo video.

Multi-Touch gestures transform the way you interact with your Mac, making all you do more intuitive and direct. Now an even richer Multi-Touch experience comes to OS X Lion. Enjoy more fluid and realistic gesture responses, including rubber-band scrolling, page and image zoom, and full-screen swiping. Learn More ….

Mission Control brings together full-screen apps, Dashboard, Exposé, and Spaces in one new feature that gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything on your system. With a single swipe on the trackpad, your desktop zooms out to Mission Control. Think of it as the hub of your system: View everything and go anywhere with just a click. Learn More …

The best way to discover apps for your Mac is now on your Mac. Just like the App Store on iPad, the Mac App Store lets you browse and download thousands of free and paid apps that you can start using right away on all your Mac computers authorized for personal use. New apps install in one step right to Launchpad, and the Mac App Store keeps track of your apps and tells you when updates are available. Learn More …
Launchpad gives you instant access to all the apps on your Mac. Just click the Launchpad icon in your Dock. Your open windows fade away, replaced by a display of all your apps. Arrange your apps any way you want, group them together in folders, or delete them from your Mac with ease. And when you download an app from the Mac App Store, it automatically appears in Launchpad, ready to blast off. Learn More

Good-bye Adobe Flash. It was nice to have known you.

Personally, I’m glad to say good-bye to flash. I don’t like heavy flash websites that a long time to load and that are often difficult to navigate. Not to mention the fact that flash contents (.swf) are not indexed by search engines. To those of you who still have flash websites, nana nana boo boo … told ya so!!

Heres an article I found interesting on the subject.

Summary: It’s official, Adobe is putting its future mobile video efforts behind HTML5. So, do you really think that desktop Flash will survive for long?

But have no fear there is Adobe Edge (still in development) is on the way to save the and give us back our animations, transitions and special effects all generated with html and java script. Stay tuned.

Quote of the day:
“Success is walking from failure to failure
with no loss of enthusiasm”.
Winston Churchill

This was my first computer in 1985. I worked in the composing room of a  newspaper publishing company. At first we used the Apple computer to do production schedules and other internal documents, but soon we used it for classified and display ads. Different than other computers on the the market the apple had a graphical user interface (GUI) and used square pixels instead of rectangular ones, making it far easier to accurately map graphics to the screen making it the obvious choice for graphic design studios and publishing companies.

With no previous computer experience and never taken a business course or even a typing class but with this computer I was able to point and click my way to full pagination earning a promotion to production manager  and I was in love with my Mac. Over the next few years typesetting machines, production cameras, dark rooms, chemical processors were replaced with scanners, lazer printers and Macs. Desktop Publishing was born.

Here’s to you Steve Jobs. Thank you for your beautiful, usable computers.  As the shock at his premature loss has given way to a celebration of his life it’s been amazing to read all of the personal anecdotes of those lucky enough to have known him.

Here’s a rare 1996 interview with Steve Jobs on Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser

Awesome works of art tributes to Steve Jobs

And finally: A Quote from Steve Jobs

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Do something great.

Special thanks to personal trainer Margaret Iutzi or “Fit To Be Tried” in Rockwood for coming out and supporting me during my cold and windy 5.5K run of the hopscotch course.

Thanks also to my friend and associate, Josh Rivers for donating his time and his talents for the cause. Josh spent the day drawing caricatures of children at the event. (see below) Josh was I collaborated on the logo design and branding for the Hopscotch 4 Hop event.

We were very proud to be a part of this event, not only as a local business, but as a member of the community. It was inspirational to see what come from the great efforts of a few hard working kids, with the support of their families. Congratulation to everyone. Hope to see you all again next year!

[Show as slideshow]

This is a family event so bring the kids.
From 9 am – Noon you can Walk, Run or Hop the course
From Noon – 5 pm Enjoy Live Music, Activities & Entertainment
Speakers at 1:00pm Free the Children 3:00pm Right to Play
BBQ, Ice Cream, plus more.

See you there!

I’m especially proud to help my friend (and step niece) Marissa Jessup follow her dreams and open her floral design business. From ‘I do’ to ‘just because’ Marissa can help make any size event complete with beautiful flowers. All the best success to Ruffles and Twine.