Weaning Away From the Last Few Months

If you’re a regular, you’ll notice a new look around here. Yeah, I just need a new change of scenery, like a divorcee who needs to move and get a new car – same feeling, I’m sure. I found a slew of really nice free themes and have been purchasing a few premium themes for my client sites in the last 2 weeks.

Amazingly, this one is completely out of the box, except for deleting the fixed height of the tags line under the posts for when it needs to wrap to two lines. It’s been a mentally and emotionally rough ride the last two weeks, but I’ve got the best wife a guy could ask for and we’re giving this self-employment shot the best shot I can.

For now, I’m booked for the next two weeks solid with quite a few sites/clients in limbo while we discuss their situation and options before they decide to go forward. It’s been strange to only “work” (by that, I mean bill my time) for 2-5 hours per day, but I can say with absolute certaintly that few things are more satisfying than wrapping up a project, getting the PayPal payment, and getting a “thank you” e-mail with a client testimonial for JessePetersen.com. THAT is what work is supposed to be like. It was, and is again.

Hallelujah for that return to normalcy, if there is such a thing.

New Sports Team Theme Available

One day, my mind wouldn’t stop working in overdrive. You know those days; just sitting there working on something and the ideas for a million other things won’t stop. I had one of those moments of brilliance and just HAD to e-mail my boss, Cory, about what popped in my head:

I went to bed last night and had such a good idea (IMHO) that I got back up and wrote it down: iSports – a theme for junior sports leagues and those local professional teams.

He replied in the morning that our project manager/designer, James Dalman, had already talked to him about doing that for his son’s football team. They were full-bore on the idea at that point.

Looking back, that was August 30th, so here we are one month later with an AWESOME theme for all the Pop Warner football and Little League baseball, and local soccer teams out there, all easily able to be set up with WordPress. I’ve already produced 13 video tutorials for walkthroughs to getting iTeam set up on your site, and there are a few more on the way.

The last little gravy we added, in addition to our normal arsenal of easy-to-use themes, is an image cross-fader for that home page’s feature image. All you do is add the images using our custom interface (so easy your kids can do it themselves), and choose the display options. Here is a run-down of the rest of the features:

  • Post Game Video On Your Website – Upload your sports video to YouTube or Vimeo and insert it directly into the iTeam home page through our iTeam Dashboard options page
  • Upload Your Team’s Logo – Our image uploader feature allows you to personalize your site with your own logo
  • Showcase Sports Photos Easily – iTeam comes with a random image script that allows you to display multiple photos on your home page; plus we’ve got a Flickr photo gallery installed as well
  • Post Live Games Updates – Using Twitter.com and iTeam, you can easily post live game updates to your team’s website

Download iTeam here when it releases on Monday, October 6th, 2008.