Yes, that’s correct. I actually made a political campaign website.
The site is for a friend, John DeMattia, for the Richardson, TX City Council Elections coming up on May 14th. The site address is: www.johnforrichardson.com and it’s a little six-pager I put together using my “Antares” website framework. The site is called: www.johnforrichardson.com.
John is running because he has witnessed the current city government mismanage funds and get the city into debt by making unwise choices. John wants to get Richardson, TX back on a fiscally sound standing and help the city by serving.
He is a member of an organization called The Richardson Citizens Alliance, which is running a slate of candidates to oppose the Richardson Coalition candidates, some of whom are the incumbents in the race.
Antares is a small framework I have been working on for a while and have finished and put the final touches on. This was the first real test to see just how much time I could save using it as a starting base of code for a site.
It essentially gives me a frame of header, content and footer with all margins, padding, divs, CSS, HTML, SlideShowPro (a flash based slide show software) and Lightbox (image zoom effect where the background grays out) all pre-coded. You just create a certain sized header and footer and add copy and images and the site fills in pretty quickly.
In this case, from start to finish it took 2.25 hours to make the site.
So we are sitting at Fortuna and Isaac’s for dinner and David calls and asks to be put on speakerphone. Now David hates talking on the speakerphone so we knew something was up. Jon guessed correctly and said “I bet they got engaged.” Yup!
So that’s how we found out (yeah, I know, I’m slow to make a post) that our middle son David Rahmani and his long-time girlfriend Amy Goldman have gotten engaged!
David managed to get Amy to a mountain top near Bolder, Colorado at sunset, got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. She did say yes.
It looks like the wedding will be somewhere in Colorado in the summer of 2012.
They are exploring different venues and options. Both Amy and David are both very excited and are really getting into the planning.
All we know for now is that it will be in Colorado and that there will be an engagement party near Austin this month. The plans are coming fast and furious though. David and Ruthie have had zillions of phone calls since the engagement was announced.
More on this as developments occur…
Where I work, at The University of Texas at Dallas, the Debate program is an important part of the university’s identity, likewise with the Chess program.
In fall of 2010 I launched the redesign or the Chess website in one of our new templates, which we call Venus. It was coded using Adobe Dreamweaver templates.
Since then, we have started rolling our some new sites using the WordPress MU platform, which is the multi-user version of WordPress.
The UT Dallas Debate website is the first site I have redesigned using WordPress and it just launched this past week. It also uses the Venus template, which first had to be imported into WordPress. It was the first Venus site our team in University Web Services had done so there was a big learning curve getting the template into WordPress in the first place.
It’s not totally like creating a WordPress template from scratch, which I have not attempted, because you are not using any widgets like most templates would use.
It was essentially chopping our already coded template up into the various php files that make up the pieces of a template. It was complicated by the fact that our Dreamweaver templates share CSS and other code from a templates directory on our server and that had to be preserved in case there are changes to the template down the road which will change all sites using Venus.
I think the site worked out pretty well and you cannot tell that the Chess site is static HTML and the Debate site is WordPress.
Has anyone else tried to do this with their different sites and what was your experience?
