Why hello there, I’m Jonathan McGaha and I’m 1/3 of IBG Design.  I handle any coding and server needs for the company.  I started with HTML when I was in eighth grade and was able to turn that into two part time jobs in high school.  Along the way I discovered the web standards revolution that caused me to completely change how I coded.  After that I wanted to get away from editing static html pages whenever an update was needed.  After messing in Wordpress and other PHP software I took some classes in PHP so that I would be able to write PHP from scratch.  So now I spend my days coding html/css/php in Coda on my 15” MacBook Pro.

Blog Number One

June 17, 2008

Introducing

Today is my first blog post on my first real blog.  It’s amazing that it took this long to do.  Anyone that knows me knows that I have a few vices, one of them being Google Reader.  I have 400+ feeds right now where I read mainly web designers talking about all aspects of their work and lives.  So after analyzing from afar how they write and pinpointing the type of posts that have been helpful to me, I’m going to take a stab at writing here.

IBG

This also marks the unveiling of the ibgdg.com website.  After finding inconsistent amounts of work on our own, we’ve decide to group together and work off of each other’s strengths.  Russ has been handling all the business aspects of the business so that we are actually a business and not just guys carrying business cards with phantom company names on them.  Russ also laid out the main parts of the design of the site.  When I started putting it all together I wanted to go back and rework the site in a grid.  I figured I would start with a CSS framework to see how easy they were to work with.  Blueprint was my first choice because that was the first one I remembered hearing about.  But after examining the code I didn’t really feel comfortable with how it all worked.  So I switched over to 960.gs which has been getting rave reviews.  The code in this framework was much easier to customize to how I like and was even easy to remove 2 columns because our site was not the standard 960px.  Now everything lines up beautifully and was a breeze to code.  We’re now using their psd templates when we start laying out a website.

ExpressionEngine

Another big desire has been to develop a site in ExpressionEngine.  Everyone always talks about how great it is but finding good tutorials/books on the topic has been difficult.  I followed Michael Boyink’s website and bought his book but there was still a large part that was not clicking.  That was until Ryan Irenlan came out with his ExpressionEngine screencasts.  Currently he is on video number 5 and each one has been invaluable to me.  Now that I have had a good run-through of the basics from Ryan, I am getting much more out of Michael Boyink’s book.  After all is said and done, I would expect the ibgdg.com website to be somewhat of a testbed of my knowledge and grasp of ExpressionEngine.  So stay tuned to see how else we will push the envelope with our ExpressionEngine wizardry and hopefully a few posts on developing in ExpressionEngine from a CMS beginner.

2 comments | posted by Jonathan McGaha