Wordpress Showcase. Who Knew?

I can’t say I’m one of the people who regularly visits Wordpress.org - who actually does? (unless you’re about to download the latest version for a new project) However I was digging through the forums recently and discovered they now have a Showcase of Wordpress websites there. Seeing as its relatively new, I figure they haven’t been berated with 1000’s of submissions a day like any good CSS gallery usually probably is. So I decided to send in my personal windsurfing website I designed: www.AUS120.com. Low and behold, I had an incredible spike in traffic on the first day it popped up, peaking at around 6,000 unique hits in the first 24 hour period. Considering my website is targetted mainly towards the windsurfing world and for my sponsors within the windsurfing world (a very niche group) - this was great publicity and I’d recommend to anyone to submit their new website to the Showcase. Albeit the site needs to be pretty nice to get selected …

Checkout AUS120.com on the Wordpress Showcase.

Top 25 Pro Athlete Websites

As a Professional Athlete myself, I’m always interested to see what other athletes are doing to promote themselves on the internet. One would think that with the amount of money flying around in most high-profile sports these days, the highest earning athletes on the planet would surely have the slickest looking websites; this is not always the case. What shocked me more is that I could only find 2-3 athlete websites using Wordpress as a CMS. Suffice to say there are some great athlete websites out there but they are in the few, so I’ve compiled a list of my favourites for you everyone to check out.

I didn’t really want to join the list of billions on the web posting a ‘my favourite blog designs of 2008′ article which most likely they ripped from SmashingMagazine anyhow, but spending a few hours today doing some research I’ve discovered that there are absolutely zero resources on the web to list professional athletes websites (I got the list mostly from googling famous sports heroes and trying to find their websites) and it seems the more famous the athlete, the less they spend on their website budget (mostly I would think, because the internet is not a great marketing tool for sports compared to Television and Print media - sorry guys!).

Anyhow, I thought I could be the first to publish a list like this featuring athletes, and I would hope with a few Diggs from you guys out there this could be become a valuable resource for webdesigners who have been given the task to build the new Roger Federer website. So enjoy and read on to check the sites!

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Flash Headline in Arthemia Theme

On a recent project I just finished  I got to try out the Arthemia Premium theme and here is what I came up with: www.followthewinds.com. I had quite a few emails from people asking me how I got the flash animation working in the Headline section. Funnily enough, I saw the script on someone else’s website and figured out how to do it myself.

Unfortunately, its not a free script; it’s “paid” and will set you back US$15 from FlashDen:
http://www.flashden.net/item/accordion-v1-xml/4332

You can get other similar scripts for free but they’re not as complete and usually haven’t got the .xml file attached which will let you very easily add text to the images and assign the right pictures without editing the original flash files (.swf/.fla) themselves.

This script was a little tricky to get to work in because (my copy at least) didn’t come with any decent instructions and it wasn’t apparent where all the files needed to be sitting in your header.php and in your source folder. Anyhow, I worked it out after all the emails I received from others asking how I did this, I decided I’ll put a quick tutorial together on how you can put it in the Arthemia theme.
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