An idea to start some activity in the Website Design Forum

[Xenia]

Mangrove, I think you site looks great, Very Clean, sharp, and well layed out. I wouldn't believe 2011 was your first year, everything looks very professional. That's what I like about this community, always raising the bar but supplying the path to bring you along.

[Materdaddy]

Well I’m a complete newbie when it comes to most of this stuff. A year and a half ago I had no idea how to weld, solder a board, how to make lights flash let alone how to create and maintain a website. However what I lacked in knowledge, I made up for in ambition. I asked a lot of silly questions and this great community of folks helped me out!

2011 was my first year with blinky flashy versus the standard static display.

As for my website, I bought a book about WordPress, I like NASCAR so I went to Go Daddy for hosting and jumped in. Probably not the best choices but for a guy who knew nothing about web design and hosting it worked. I owe A LOT to Mat er daddy for helping me get the site to look the way I wanted it; thanks again Mat! (believe me he had the patience of Jobe and the skill of a highly trained surgeon)

I agree with Dirk, I have the best of intentions about updating the site but updates seem to fall to the bottom of the list; then off.

I’d like to learn more about how to make my site better and build upon the skills I’ve developed.

Now that I’ve given all my caveats, please visit www.MangroveLights.com

All comments, suggestions, criticism and critiques welcome!

HA, you're too kind. Trust me when I say this, I didn't need much patience. You're a lot quicker than you give yourself credit for.

Your site looks great! The only problem you have is the same one I have. Updating the darn thing!

[PD Shimmers]

Here is my link. Year 2 for web and blinky-flashy. I use a MAC and rapidweaver software for design. 1and1 is my host.

http://www.pdshimmers.com
This year I filmed the video myself, but last year a pro donated his services.

[FIRECOP252]

Well I dont have the sleek words that everyone else does....crap I dont even know how to change my site but I am hoping to get time to sit down and learn a bit sometime. Someone else built my site for me and it is not finished so I will have to be learning it sometime. Anyways my site is WWW.ASHCHRISTMASONPLANTATION.INFO if anyone would like to see. Its a small start but hope to build it up this year.

[glaforce]

I spent the weekend finding a host and learning about websites and learning about ftp and completely failing to grasp joomla. Stumbled onto Kompozer and got started. Only have a few links and contact working but so far so good. Soon I'll add a little place to leave comments and finish the links and the pages the links will point to. As I build this seasons pieces I'll upload the photos and descriptions and flesh it all out. I live in a small town and last seasons 24 renard channels were a huge hit. I stood in the seasonal section at Menard's a couple weeks after Christmas and eavesdropped as a small group talked about that Christmas light house in my town. I didn't let on that it was my house. Anyway about the website and this being a small town the local paper is always on the lookout for a nice happy story and maybe that nice newspaper lady will plug my site in an article. If 24 channels were a big hit then 120 channels should be like a rock concert and a Billy Graham event combined. The website should get everyone the information they need to come see the show and make it an even bigger success. Crossing my fingers.

Doc

I like the layout you are using. Can you tell me where you got it or if you made it? I would like to use either that very one or something very close to it for my website. I also downloaded kompozer and kind of like it so far. I had a trail of dream weaver but find it hard to use plus the trial has run out. I also edited my web page with Microsoft word and that was a bad thing. It did things to the HTML code that i don't even begin to understand.

[docchop]

Sure thing glaforce. I found the original freebie template and a lot of others on this website and here is Komposer and PageBreeze. I think out of the two PageBreeze has been much easier to get going with.

[Greg Young]

Thanks for posting the links to the templates docchop!
Greg

[wbottomley]

I started with something basic years ago and now I'm on my third design. I still add any Christmas related content I can find to my website. Some of the information there is related to the hobby itself. For example, some of my sequences, links to other places with free sequences, "How To" blog, and much more. I'm currently Joomla 1.5 with a few mods installed.

Check it out and tell me what you think.

[BillinSoFL]

The idea for my website was that it would be the home for my holiday display and help promote it. I am blogging about how I build elements, setup and run the various aspects. Hopefully this will help keep the content fresh and encourage people to come back. Some of the content will be replicated (in-part) on our Facebook page with links back to my site for complete content. That way if people like us on Facebook they'll know when we've made changes to the site. Hopefully it all comes together. I'll continue to evolve the site and our Facebook page until I'm getting good traffic. This will include content and meta-data changes until I'm getting search engine and other placements that I'm satisfied with

For those of you running WordPress I'm providing a list of plug-ins that should help managing your site a bit more easy others help with security or provide other under-the hood improvements:

Ultimate TinyMCE - This one IS AWESOME. Really helps with content authoring.
Link Library - Recently added this so I can showcase other Friend's websites, etc. Extends existing Wordpress Links. Pretty nice.
Simple Page Ordering - This is critical for menu ordering, etc.
CleanCode NZ Exclude Pages Plugin - Exclude pages from your WP menus. They are public, they just don't show up. I use for donation thank you pages, etc.
Add Meta Tags
Broken Link Checker
Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Cool Video Gallery
HTML Javascript Adder
NextGEN Gallery
PayPal Donations
Simple Facebook Connect
Simple Local Avatars
Usernoise
WP Security Scan

I posted a link sharing thread a couple weeks back. Seems a little difficult to get these going... this thread seemed like it was aimed at helping people improve their sites, not necessarily link sharing. My site's links are in my signature below. I would love to trade for those who are interested.

[dmcole]

For those of you running WordPress I'm providing a list of plug-ins that should help managing your site a bit more easy others help with security or provide other under-the hood improvements:

Pretty nice list. To it I would add:

*Akismet -- Comment and trackback spam protector. I used to use WP-SpamFree until the author gave up on it about a year ago. I switched over to Akismet and fewer than a half-dozen spams have hit the page since then.

*Google XML Sitemaps -- I used to be really picky about sitemaps and built them all by hand ... now I use plugins. This one is pretty good.

Best o' luck.

\dmc