Ever since I debuted my Content Management System a few weeks ago, I've gotten much positive feedback and some questions. Most of the feedback came from web designers who loved the idea of custom-built solutions and wanted to know more on how they could build their own CMS, or just be able to more effectively modify existing solutions to meet their clients' needs.

This is the start of a series where I'm going to dive into the "need to know this" ideas of PHP that I mainly use in much of my code work. As this series progresses, you'll learn how to pull and display data from a database, add new data in, edit it, and delete it when you want. I'm sure proficient PHP coders won't be interested in this series, but this is ideal if you're just diving in and want results faster.

It's been several years since I bought my first iPhone, and months since I dove into Android with my ThinkPad Tablet. I only find it fitting that I make some space here in this blog simply to review the many apps I've bought and tried over the years. I'll have these reviews split up amongst iOS and Android, but I will try to equally cover both sides.

Today I'm going to kick off this section with a look at five apps built to replace or supplement a tool many photographers use known as a light meter. Normally it would look like a device with a small white dome used before a shoot. Its function is to show the photographer the ideal settings for his camera to get the perfect shot.

With the myriad of choices for a content management system (CMS) out there, it would seem silly that I would just go out and build my own. I mean, we have Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, NUKE...why would I go and build my own?

I have a variety of valid reasons that I will share with you today, as well as give you some insight if you ever want to try this on your own. If you want to pass on all this and just see the demo, click here.

It started with a tweet from a designer who showed his disdain for the new generation of web designers who can't even write any HTML code. His tweet grew into an explosion of replies, retweets, blogs, comments, and debate on this subject. Both sides chimed in speaking of how he's right and others on how he's wrong.

I myself subscribe to his beliefs. I can't imagine doing web design without the knowledge that I've amassed in coding and just simply "how things work". I've borne witness to many incidents where a lack of knowledge in code on the part of a designer has ended up making a project into a large mess.

I must admit I was surprised. I engaged in my usual wake-up regime of reading the news and Facebook when I came across an article posted on wpcentral.com and USA Today. It spoke of a study that showed that while millions of people own smartphones, most barely use more than five apps on a regular basis

The central thought journalists were trying to make is for the millions of apps floating around the various stores, most users really didn't seem to care. Outside of news, weather, email, and some social network apps, most apps simply are barely used or never used; and thus it looked like apps are not the driving force behind one's decision to buy a smartphone in general or of a particular brand.

With branding set and a new logo finalized, the next step of this project for Illusion Bar • Grill • Café is the website redesign. The venue has had two websites in the past which performed perfectly fine with regards to displaying information, but I personally felt they did not bode well in neither setting a firm branding of the restaurant nor being an effective marketing tool for the client.

I took the time to look over many websites of restaurants and bars, even coming across articles on mistakes made in designing such websites, and moved forward in how I always felt a restaurant website should function. Today we'll go through what I came up with and my logic in the final piece.