There’s plenty of PSD to WP conversion companies out there, but none that tailor to child themes, specifically. So I’m giving this a test run.

The first five requests I get will be $300. Send the tweets out and let your friends know about this deal because it won’t last long.

What you get:

• A custom Hybrid child theme
• One home page and one interior page
• W3C Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict/CSS
• IE 7+, Firefox, Safari, Chrome compatibility
• SEO Code, Load Speed Optimization

In addition, I’ll be turning the designs around in one day each. Meaning, you’re likely to get your site the next day and, at most, five days later.

Interested?

Just visit the Contact page and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Your best friend here is SyncToy. There’s lots of backup tools out there, but most aren’t free. If they are, then they probably aren’t any good. However, SyncToy is both free and awesome. So go download it.

A prerequisite to all of this is that you have another drive to backup to. You’ll likely want a large external hard drive (I’m using a 1TB drive) so that you leave yourself plenty of growing room. So let’s setup SyncToy to backup our drive.

Setting Up SyncToy

You could just backup your Documents folder or your Pictures, but if we’re gonna play it safe let’s just backup our entire C drive (or whichever your main drive is).

Create a New Folder Pair

Your Left Folder is going to be your regular drive with all your stuff on it (C drive). Your Right Folder is the backup (your external drive, probably).

Action

SyncToy gives you three options on how to backup.

• Synchronize
• Echo
• Contribute

We don’t want to Synchronize files because if you ever accidentally deleted something it would be reflected on both drives. We want to save everything just in case.

Echo sends everything to the backup drive, but if you change a file or folder name on the original drive then those changes are reflected on both drives. This is an okay option, but again, I’d rather keep everything just in case. That’s why we’re doing this in the first place!

So, I’ve chosen Contribute as it just backs up everything. If you rename a file then you have the old name and the new name on the backup drive.

Scheduling Your Backup

I’d prefer to have everything backed up nightly, but you have the option to do whatever you want. However often you chose, here’s how to schedule on Vista or Windows 7. For other operating systems, use SyncToy’s help menu as this is just coped right from there anyway:

1. From the Start menu, select All Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Task Scheduler.
2. Select Create Basic Task in the Actions pane on the right.
3. Add a Name and Description and select Next.
4. Choose when you want the task to start and select Next.
5. Choose date/times (if applicable) to run task and select Next.
6. Choose Start a Program option and select Next.
7. Select Browse and locate the SyncToyCmd.exe.
8. Type -R in the Add Arguments textbox. -R all by itself will run all folder pairs that are active for run all. If you want to run just a single folder pair, add -R"My Pair" to the end of the command line.

Now you can sleep well. Of course, this is only one step. What if your office caught fire and your computer and backup drive were destroyed. You probably won’t ever face that problem, but you’d want to look into remote backups to play it safe. But at least taking this step is much safer than you were before!

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that when I booted up my computer I was getting a message that one of my two hard drives had failed, but everything was still working fine so I did about five minutes of research and gave up.

Then I came home from Thanksgiving to a DOS screen that told me that no bootable drive could be found. It ran some tests and eventually worked. But just about anytime I left the room I came back to the error message and it became increasingly more difficult to boot up. Then it just wouldn’t boot at all.

So, I went and bought a new drive today (Windows just finished installing, so I’ll wrap this up soon) and I’m back in business.

Thankfully on Black Friday I noticed Target was selling 1TB external hard drives for $59.99 (that’s crazy!) so I got one and as soon as I got home started backing up all my data. I already have another external HD, but it was about to max out.

In the past I haven’t been so fortunate to have all my data backed up, but I made a concerted effort to backup everything this past year and it certainly paid off.

Make sure you’re backing up your computer and your website. It’s not a lesson worth learning the hard way.

Jared Hernandez has been a friend of mine for a while and I’ve been watching him improve his photography for years now and it’s pretty incredible how great he is now. I mean, just look at this picture — I don’t really look that good. Well, maybe I do ;)

Anyway, posing for pictures isn’t that fun, but Jared did a great job and I wanted to share them with you.

I’ve fallen in love with Hybrid, a theme framework. Building child themes for Hybrid is easy to do and easy to maintain. The whole idea of child themes is just a wonderful advancement in the WordPress world.

Fonts
My favorite improvement is the typography. Overall the fonts are more consistent, but on top of that I’m taking advantage of @font-face which allows you to embed fonts into the CSS. Its not perfect in all browsers (most noticeably Chrome, which won’t work by default). Firefox does the best job rendering the font.

Portfolio
The portfolio page makes room for more items. The previous version listed them in one column which eventually would have made for a pretty long page. Now they’re listed in three columns and more friendly with a thumbnail, link to an overview of the project and a link to the site itself.

Themes
The final major change I made is that I’ve finally got a place to list my WordPress themes. They’ve always been accessible somewhere, but they weren’t always easy to find.

A couple months back I launched the new Darcy site. And for those of you who haven’t heard of Darcy yet, this is for you!

Not only are Darcy my friends, but they happen to be incredible musicians, songwriters, and performers in addition to being really great guys.

The whole world needs to hear them. There’s something indescribably unique about their music. You’ll know what I mean when you listen to their songs.

Check them out at http://darcyband.com/.

I didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be to pick just one organization. The goals for all of the applicants’ organizations were worthy & respectable.

But I did pick one…

The winner is: Champions of Hope in Dallas, TX

To all of the other applicants, I thank you for taking the time to do what you do. I would love to offer a free website every year, so if you’re still on the hunt for a web designer in 2010, come on back!

Champions of Hope will receive a custom designed web site & free hosting for one year (if needed).

Desperately Need A Website?

If you applied (or even if you didn’t), I would love to still help out in some way.

For non-profits only, I’m offering a 40% discount. A typical, custom-designed website costs $2,500. At 40% off you’ll pay $1,500.

To Other Designers & Developers

I have many applications for organizations in need of help. If you could spare some of your time, these non-profits would be incredibly grateful to have new and/or improved web sites.

Comment here or contact me through my website.

1. I’ll be announcing the winner of the free website on Friday.
2. I need some help beta testing a premium WordPress theme I’ll be releasing very soon (that means you get it free).

I’ll be announcing the winner next week. So, get the word out before the March 1 deadline!

Well, there’s still a company out there doing things really well. MOO.

A couple of weeks ago I submitted by business cards to be printed by MOO — a pretty cool company that offers really simple, yet creative ways of doing business cards and other things.

I was so excited when I opened the package from them. Then it sucked.

The cards were black background with dark gray text — exactly what I’d ordered, but not what it looked like when I used my printer. Obviously I didn’t play it very safely by doing dark on dark.

The cards are useless now. No one can read them.

Well, I emailed MOO and explained my stupidity but also made mention that on my screen and on the paper I’d printed on the cards looked great.

Twelve hours later Ricardo emailed me to tell me that because their cards have a matte laminate it cuts down on the brightness. Then he gave me a coupon for a free print. Thanks Ricardo!

So now I’ve reprinted my cards with the changes and hope to have some beautiful cards in the mail next week.

Preemptive Reputation Management

This also goes to show that treating customers right can go a long way. I’m by no means a world famous blogger, but MOO is getting free press out of this and avoiding the need for reputation management down the road.