Today we launched the New England Vegetable Management Guide website.

This site was a challenge because we were tasked with putting a whole book on the web.

The Vegetable Guide is published bi-annually. It is composed by some of the most respected experts from all over New England. 

We are very pleased to announce the re-launch of Malcolm Pirnie's website. They are an environmental consulting firm based in White Plains, NY.

We originally built Pirnie's site back in 2006 in Joomla 1.0.  At that point in time, we made heavy use of exmenu -- an extension that allowed menus to be broken into a main top nav and a left side nav.  I think I had about 8 templates on the site as well, including one for the home page, one blank page, and about 6 variations on the inside page.

After Bill ported the site to Joomla 1.5, we slimmed this to three templates -- one for home, one for inside, and a blank page. We used a lot of interesting templating tricks to get this done.  We also added FrontPage Slideshow and Wysiwyg Pro for the editor -- making for easier pasting from Word, easier creation of internal links, and easy maintenance.

Happy New Year, dear readers, and Happy Birthday to 4Web!  Today we are 1 year old. And what a year it's been.

After setting up our company, we've landed a bunch of new business as well as building on old business from clients from our former freelance companies. 

Our biggest highlights of 2008 were winning the Best E-Commerce Site award at the CMS Expo conference, launching the Brew Your Own and WineMaker sites, and all of our presentations at CMS Expo.

Last night at the CMS Expo awards, we won Best Joomla E-Commerce site for our work on WineMaker Magazine. Yay us; yay WineMaker! Bill is going to get our certificate scanned in so we can put it up on the site and we'll share it with you then.

I'm tickled to announce that my new videos, "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates" was released at Lynda.com today. Check them out!  Starting tomorrow, there will be a live action shot of me doing the introduction. There are a few free videos, so please go click all over them and check them out. Better yet, subscribe! Lynda.com is a great resource for learning all kinds of great skills.

My second set of videos, "Joomla! Advanced CSS" will be out later, maybe in a month or two.

In conjunction with Church & Main, we've launched the new Concord Group Insurance site.

CGI is a longtime client of Church & Main.  Their previous site was static HTML. While it looked great, it wasn't possible for CGI to make their own edits.

Church & Main provided us with all graphic design direction as well as strategy for the site. We built the site based on their requirements.

Finally, after months of work, we are thrilled to announce we've launched Brew Your Own: The How-To Homebrew Beer Magazine.

This is a companion site to WineMaker Magazine, which was released earlier, in September.

BYO has been around for years, and puts out all kinds of interesting articles and resources for home beer brewers. We used a ton of extensions to make this site go, including JoomSuite Content, RS Gallery 2, MyBlog, VirtueMart, the Joomla poll and the Joomla banner module.

I just got back from a week in Ventura, CA, working for Lynda.com.  If you don't know them, they are one of the best training resources out there for most things related to web development.  Way back at Dreamweaver 3 and Photoshop 5.5, I learned these programs via Lynda.com Hands-On Training books.  They've since put a huge emphasis on their online training video library. The videos are fantastic and very helpful for explaining how to do just about anything in the Adobe or web world.

Back in June, Lynda.com made their first push into the Joomla world with Joe LeBlanc's Joomla 1.5 Essential Training. They've been hearing requests for template and CSS training ever since.  I contacted them about the time the Essentials video came out, and I've been working on developing two sets of movies for them.

The  first course recorded was "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates."  This just focuses on how to transform your static HTML page to a Joomla template and goes over some common errors and problems you might have installing your templates.

I'll tell you what, the excitement is sure building for this team of 4Web to attend the conference in December. We are all looking forward to meeting all sorts of experts and to sharing our insights on how we are using Joomla to enhance our clients' reputations!

Joomla is just fabulous and this conference will be an excellent opportunity to connect with others who are using such a flexible and powerful CMS. Jen, Bill and I will be in Denver on Wednesday to lead the Joomla Basics Boot Camp. Hopefully there will be others there as well so we can help get this show kicked off.

If you haven't already checked out the site http://www.cmsexpo.net.

For our fans, we haven't been posting much because... well, we've been awfully busy. We are thrilled with our first 9 months in business. We established a new company, just as the economy was tanking and gas and oil prices were going sky-high. Yet we've had plenty of leads, and plenty of work to keep us very busy.

Watch this blog over the next 3 months. We anticipate launching 4 large, substantial sites by the end of the year, all with various custom-coded components and modules, and of course all with custom templates.  We also have several smaller sites on the way.

Why are we so busy in this frightening economy?