Chili Pepper Design

I just launched a small side-project: facebookshowcase.net! The impetus for the project was that after I finished the CPD page on Facebook, I wanted to show it off. But I couldn’t find a gallery/showcase site for Facebook pages! So I made one. One disclaimer: due to the limited time available for side projects most of the site’s design came from the Gallery theme (although I did customize it). I hope it gets some use!

• facebookshowcase.net

Not only is CPD on Facebook now, but I took the opportunity to play around with custom Tabs and Boxes. Social media in the context of business is all about customer interaction and feedback. Since Facebook introduced the Tabbed Profile and Fan Pages earlier this year it has become a great tool for brands to get their "social media" mojo and still maintain their image and promote their product or service. To learn how to create and add custom Tabs to your own Facebook Fan Page, check out my blog entries on the subject:

• Custom Facebook Tabs Part 1
• Custom Facebook Tabs Part 2

A site I recently “cut and sliced” is now online. I didn’t design this site: this is an example of how I can take designs from other professional designers and turn them into functional websites. This site is fast, cross-browser, standards-compliant, SEO-friendly xHTML and CSS, and looks exactly like the Photoshop file I worked from. Check it out:

• Real Estate Composer Website
• Read more about this project on my Portfolio page

Here at Chili Pepper Design, I’ve evangelized CMS Made Simple before. It truly is a nice, easy-to-use and easy-to-theme Open Source CMS with great built in features and extensions. Now, I’ve got a short Screencast video to prove how awesome it is! In the video, I log in to the CMS and make a couple quick changes to the content, as a proof of concept. This is my first attempt at a sceencast, so bear with me on the poor quality, but check it out for yourself:

• CMS Made Simple Screencast Demo Video

I’ve learned so many new things about web design in the last year that, as of last week, I could no longer stand the sight of the Chili Pepper Design page. Time for a redesign! I kept the basic visual style, but modernized it a little, made it more accessible, added some Javascript fanciness to the Portfolio, gave the whole site a Textpattern CMS backend so I could update it more easily and most importantly, added a blog where I can share my thoughts about web design. Poke around and check it out!

I just finished my latest project, PowderBlog.com. It’s blog about skiing, ski resorts, life in ski towns and – of course – powder. It’s a new WordPress 2.7 install, with a really nice and easy to use administrative back-end. The custom 3-column theme is built off of the Blueprint CSS Framework. WordPress has been fully SEO optimized, cached for speed, and the RSS feeds have even been burned. Take a gander:

• PowderBlog