What is it that you are looking for in your site? What would you like your site to do? How often are you planning on updating your site? Would you like to have the ability to change your site? Well these are some of the questions that we ask a client that comes to us wanting a site. Most people don’t understand that their is much more to a site then just having a idea of “I need a site” or “my company needs a site.” With these questions that I have asked it starts me thinking would it be better for my client to have a CMS or not. A CMS is a Content Management System it is used to give the buyer the ability to make small changes to the site pages in case they may need to change some text or something little. Once I find out that my client may need a CMS then comes the point of giving the client a CMS that will work with their needs. For instance if a client came to me and said that they would like a site that has a blog area that they could update daily. The first thing that comes to my mind is WordPress. Let alone WordPress is very user friendly it has so many capabilities and plugins that are free. If my client came to me and said that they would like a site that they would only have to change about every 6 months or more. I would probably look at either building the site with static information or using a smaller CMS. My personal preference would be Frog CMS. It is easy to learn and is easy to customize because of its small size. Their are a lot of different opinions on what is the best CMS. I don’t really think their is a “best” I feel that it really depends on the situation and the developers preference. A short list of some of the free CMS’s out their:

Most Known

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla

Not So Known

• Frog CMS
• Media Wiki
• Typo3 CMS
• Moodle
• Dolphin
• Pligg CMS
• Movable Type
• Xoops
• Geeklog
• e107
• Mambo
• Nucleus CMS

My Opinion

This is just a few of the vast amount of CMS’s out their that you can choose from. Note that all of these are free open source CMS’s. I have mt own opinion about these CMS’s and I believe even though Drupal and Joomla are two of the biggest CMS’s they are two of the most complicated. I personally would stick with WordPress for blog sites and for smaller sites I would go with Frog CMS but this is my personal opinion. I would say defiantly try out multiple CMS’s to see what you build a preference to. If you have tried out any of the CMS’s on the list or any that are not on the list please feel free to leave a comment about them.

Web Design And Development

If you by change need web design or web development done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are small but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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Most Valuable Function

I am going to start off this functions post talking about probably the most heavily used WordPress function called bloginfo. This is a really useful function if you can understand it. It is quite easy to start the function because it is built in to WordPress all you have to do is call the function and give it what parameters you would like it to have. The code to call this function looks something like this < ?php bloginfo(‘YOUR PARAMETERS’); ?>. As you can see it is quite easy to call this function but in order to understand what you can do with this function is another hurdle.

List of the Parameters

• admin_email
• atom_url
• charset
• comments_atom_url
• comments_rss2_url
• description
• home
• html_type
• language
• name
• pingback_url
• rdf_url

• rss2_url
• rss_url
• siteurl
• stylesheet_directory
• stylesheet_url
• template_directory
• template_url
• text_direction
• url
• version
• wpurl

Well that looks like a long list of stuff but a lot of those come in handy quite often. I am not going to go into what they all do but I will talk to you about a couple of them so that you have some idea of what you can do with them.

Most Common Parameters

The first one that I am going to talk about is the url. Well to me this one is self explanatory what this does for your site is echos out the url of the site. So if your site is http://www.example.com then the bloginfo function for url would echo out your url. So if you needed to do an a tag and you wanted to echo out your url all you would have to do is say now a lot of people would look at that and say why wouldn’t I just write my url in their instead. Well if you write your url in there it will only work for your url and so if you are creating a theme then you wouldn’t be able to sell this theme. now I am going to move on to another parameter known as name. All that this does is echos out what you called your blog and you can change this inside the admin section of WordPress. So a practical use for this would be putting it inside of the a tag that we just used so it would look like this <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>. That way if you named your blog EXAMPLE the link would say EXAMPLE. The last parameter that I am going to talk about is description this is also known as your tag line. You can also set this up inside of the admin section of your blog. This comes in handy quite often in the header and footer sections of a site. Mainly because almost every company has a tag line or MATO that they try to emphasize on. So by saying <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?> you can plaster your MATO all over your site. Well that is my last example for you I really hope that you start messing around with the other parameters because they can come in really great use to you and your site.

Additional Help – Chosen LLC

If you are in need of some help with your WordPress site or any other web related issues you can either contact me or you can go to the Chosen Development site for more help. We are based out of Saint Johns, Michigan and we specialize in Design and Development we do seminars in the Lansing Area on all different types of web information. Chosen is a growing company of about 8 people 4 full time and 4 part time. We would love to hear from you about possible Design or Development work and if you are from the Lansing Area we would be willing to meet with you.

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• Web Directories
• Friends and Colleagues
• Personal Interest
• Blogging

Most people would look at this list and think what does that mean well I am going to tell you. Web Directories are places that you can submit your website and have it on display inside that companies database of sites. A lot of times these places have a paid and non-paid submission process. This means that if you take the free non-paid one you will be put on a list of maybe hundreds of sites that have to go through a inspection process to see if your site is a fit for the directory. This could take somewhere from 1 to 6 months. The reason it takes so long is because most of these places only charge like $5 to $25 for the paid submission and anyone who pays gets put at the front of the list.

Friends and Colleagues this is kind of self explanatory you meet someone and enjoy what they have so you put a link on your site to there stuff. This creates a backlink for them. If you look at the top of my site I have some of my colleagues and companies most of them are broken down into multiple links to more than just there home page. This will create a back link for more than just the main page.
Personal Interest this is one that you might say what does that mean. Well I give it this name because it means sites that you personally like. If you find a site that you enjoy give them a back link weather it be in a post or somewhere out of site. This will boost there rating and sometimes if you contact that specific person and ask them to put one on there site they might just because you did.

The last way that I create backlinks is blogging this is probably one of the best ways to create backlinks but also one of the less profitable. How you make backlinks is start posting on specific peoples site just with little comments like feedback and or other creative criticism. Once that person sees that you have been commenting on there site so much they will end up checking your site out and either you will get some great feedback or they might talk to you about backlinks.

Well I am just throwing this out there if there is anyone who has a site and would like a backlink send me a email or comment here I will check out your site and see what I can do about giving you a backlink somewhere on my site.

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One of the aspects that I am going to have this do is make it so that you can register possible client and actual clients. With the actual clients this will allow you to register client and keep track of money that has been received from them and money that is still in the waiting. I felt that something that would be useful is a emailing system that sends you a email that a client needs to make a payment and it also sends a email to the client so that they know.

Another aspect that I am going to have this do is calculate the taxes on money received. Also a place for you to input expenses. I have a lot to do with this and would love input on the subject I would like to have this out to the public by this summer. I am at first building this to my needs and then building it to everyone’s needs. If you would like to send me any helpful info you can send it to accounting[at]shanestrong.com or you can write a comment about it.

In order for me to fund this project I need some help. Donations would be great you can send the via paypal to shanestrong05[at]gmail.com. Or if you have any web design or web development work you can contact Chosen Development.

I am currently looking for a full time job in the web design industry. Preferably somewhere in the Lansing Area. I consider myself highly skilled in XHTML, CSS, and WordPress other skills are MySQL, PHP, Java, VB, and currently learning ASP.net and ASP. If possible I would like to become a Lansing Web Developer somewhere in the Lansing Area. I feel that the Lansing Web Industry is going up even though it is a little slow right now.

Thanks You For Your Help

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Working for an advertising agency we see and here about almost everything. I am a co-owner of Chosen Development, we do everything from websites down to walking dogs. We don’t do just Logo Designs or consider our selves to being a Logo Design Company. Some of the logos that we have created were Church Logo Designs and Business Logos. Most of the people who come to our company want a logo designed for something like $20 and yes we could do that but people really need to notice that if you spend $20 on a Logo Design you are going to get $20 worth of work.

What Logo Designs Should Consist Of

Alright if you look at some of the most popular Logo Designs some of these designs might of went for hundreds of thousands of dollars. For instance if you take some of the Sport Logo Designs like Nike for instance I don’t know off hand how much they paid for there Logo but everyone knows what it is. I can definitely tell you that it wasn’t a $20 Logo Design. Most of the really popular companies might have paid up to a couple million dollars for a Logo Design. There are a few companies out there that have paid little to nothing for their Logo. For instance one of the biggest companies in the world Google not that many people know Google’s Logo but it sucks you should look it up. For a Logo Design for a small company it is a good thing to pay for something that will be worth it. For a price perspective I would have to say that a good Logo would be between $500 to $1500 and for a cheaper logo you could spend anywhere from free to $100.

Some Really Bad and I Hope Cheap Logo Designs

We took a look at some of the really bad Logos that have been designed developed. Some of these might not be appropriate for kids but that is who most of these are focused towards.

Logos found by Chosen Development – Graphic Website Logo Design.

Here is some of the Logos that I have found that are bad.
Well to start one of the newest the Pepsi Logo.
New Logo –
Old Logo –
I don’t know about you but the new logo is horrible.

Here are some other bad Logo’s.




There are quite a few Logos out there that have probably been done for either free or by somebody that has no clue what they are doing. One of our biggest mottoes here at Chosen Development is let the professionals do what they are good at. Basically it like a plumber you aren’t going to call them and say what they should do because you know that they know that they know what they are doing. So with that Logo Design is something that every business needs but would you like to pay a little and get something like these or would you rather pay a little more and get something worth your money and time.

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As I said we are going to be published in a book the name of it we are not able to give out yet. This is happening because the publishing company sees us as a different business. We aren’t the normal start up business. We came into the web design and development business with nothing but a goal. We don’t want to make millions like everyone else yeah that would be nice, more money to share with the community. We here at Chosen are looking for everyone to make money. If you take a look at our site at Chosen Development we do not look like everyone else our business site is different. I find it to be more appealing to everyone not just to clients and we here think that is how it should be. Not to point out other sites in the Lansing Area in the Web Development business but if you look at there sites you will not be impressed. Not to be mean but there sites suck, there is no creativity and the customer usability is horrible. Some of these companies make ten’s of millions of dollars a year but are they helping the people that need it no. In order to make Michigan a state known for more than a falling state, we as a community need to work together to bring more and more work to the area. One of the biggest things that we do to help the community besides getting involved with Churches, we point all the work that we don’t have the time to do or man power we send it towards our competitors. Chosen Development is based out of Saint Johns and we are one of the two web design and development companies in Saint Johns. The other is Dynamite Inc. owned be Jeremy Lound, we are currently business partners with him and his growing business.

We here at Chosen Development do all things in the advertising spectrum, we specialize in web design and development, logo design, and SEO. With web design we do thing not necessarily cheaper than everyone but if you compare everyone to our prices we are probably the best you will get for the money and time. We believe in the saying quality not quantity. We would rather make less money and make a better site than make two or three crappy sites for cheap that end up being cheap. One of the biggest thing that our business partner Jeremy helped us with is that people look at web development and design as something that you can test or you can try it to see if you want it. Well it isn’t it is more like painting a room. You dont go find a painter and ask him to paint one room to see if you like it. It ends up being either you get the room painted or not and if you get it painted you pay the painter upfront. We are taking this to heart with out business model, from now on anything no matter what price we are doing a $100 up front payment just to get with us to discuss everything. This will be treated as a deposit so you can get it back but we are finding that people don’t want it back because of the quality of work we are giving them.

Lansing Michigan is a dying state we are one of the worst unemployment states in the US. My father works with a company that makes parts for GM, Ford, and all the other automotive companies in Michigan and he has been laid off since around Christmas time. He was one of the last people to get laid off. This is a common thing in Michigan, companies laying people off right and left. Michigan needs some help and Chosen Development is hoping to be one that can help. We are looking to keep any specific office to only 10 people but that doesn’t limit the amount of offices we can have. By the year 2020 we are aiming to be in at lease 10 different states and some people might see that as a small challenge but it isn’t we here at Chosen started this company with nothing but our computers, nothing in our reserve. We here believe that God is the one that started this company and is the one that wont let it fail. We are going to take Chosen to every limit possible and God and Jesus Christ are going to be there watch over us. This is not to say that we aren’t going to slip and fall but if we do we will get back up and try again. We have made a business goal and this is a weird goal but one I think every business should adopt. We have a community prayer time everyday and we pray for each other and everyone that is having troubles. Everyone of Chosen’s employees has there own Bible and reads it regularly.

Well I hope that I have covered everything and pray that everyone takes this to heart. Thank You

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The business has a very broad focus on many different plains of advertising. The top focus right now for Chosen Development is web design. I myself am part of the company and have the position of front and back end web developer. We here at Chosen can do SEO, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, XHTML, XML, and Ruby on Rails. If you would like to look at some of our work you can go to the Chosen website, JoeSak, or Clay McIlrath. Most of our sites are powered by wordpress. We have created a few different wordpress blog theme, we do wordpress seo, can give wordpress help, and we can make new wordpress blog sites. Us here at Chosen have all came from close to nothing and are looking to take the advertising industry by storm.

Shane Strong
Chosen Development

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