If you’re a WordPress freak like I am, don’t miss Wordcamp St. Louis this year. The company I work for is putting on this venue to help others learn and become more acquainted with WordPress. You will also be able to rub shoulders with influential WP guys and network with designers and developers. It’s a one-day event of awesomeness that goes from 8am to 5pm at Maryville University. If you register early, the cost is just $20.00. Late bloomers will have to pay $30.00. I will be there taking photos and helping out as a gopher here and there.

Go get your register on at 2011.stlouis.wordcamp.org

The ever awesome Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks has now released a course on Lynda.com teaching you how to create a custom WordPress theme from scratch. The cost is $25.00/month for a Lynda subscription with no monthly contract obligations. This is a small prices for the value of the education you’ll get from this course. Lynda also offers many other video courses about a plethora of programs and topics.

Go To Lynda -> WordPress 3.0

If you’re looking for some great looking free icons for your web design, Webalys has released a pretty awesome icon and style set. Also included in the package is a massive library of web elements you can drop into your design. This kit is worth a pretty penny, but they have been so kind to give it away for free to the public.

Here are some previews:

Download the User Interface Design Framework

If you’re a web designer you know how troubling it is to embed fonts into your site without creating images or using a service like siFR or cufon or the paid service, Typekit. There are only a few select universal fonts that everyone has on their computer such as – Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia, Times New Roman, Tahoma, and several others. While some of these may work great for copy text, they aren’t the best for creative heading texts.

Last week Google announced the inception of Google Font Directory. At first I was skeptical because there are so many solutions out there. So, I tried it out today. With one line of code and one CSS attribute, I had a beautiful, selectable font embedded in my website. There are quite a few fonts to choose from, and I imagine this will be a great platform for font designers to get noticed in the community. Expect a large library of fonts in the future. See the library here.

The silky smooth process goes like this:

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This is a great resource for web designers who want to embed nice fonts in their web designs without infringing on the EULA agreements of popular fonts. Font Squirrel provides a list of dozens of free fonts to use on commercial websites. There is a nifty generator that helps you embed the fonts in your site as well. If you’re not a web designer, you can obviously use these fonts on print collateral as well. Enjoy!

Go To Font Squirrel

If you’re looking for a place packed with awesome church websites, look no further. Ministry CSS is a gallery of really nice websites. I could spend all day looking at well-organized, awesomely designed church sites.  If your website is lacking, go and browse a few or a dozen other sites to get some inspiration for your own (DON’T COPY!). By the way, CSS means Cascading Style Sheet. It’s a programming acronym for an important file used when designing websites. Go take a gander.

Go to Ministry CSS