Max Kirchoff \

Combining my experience with WordPress themeing and my “out-of-the-box” creative style, I styled a unique and rather popular WordPress Theme. As of 8/17/2009 it has over 14,000 downloads in the WordPress Theme Directory. This theme has a CSS dropdown menu set in reverse order and an intergrated thumbnail excerpt insertion function. Largely inspired by European POP art, this theme is a labour of love. Pieces of code borrowed from all over. The key feature to this theme is the homepage excerpts with randomly generated coloration. It’s a real threat to minimalist design and general organic creativity. It’s automated and audacious.

The proprietor/owner of Portland Bicycle Studio, Molly Cameron, wanted to revitalize her site after finding the previous version not as accurately representing her business, brand, or clientelle. This design was bourne out of researching similar businesses and similar brands matching the demographic of PBS. Portland Bicycle Studio, specializing in custom fitting bikes and perforance assistance, filled out the new website well. This officially launched August 13th, 2009. It is built entirely on WordPress, and the theme is a highly modified version of another GPL WordPress theme. It utilizes a flash “feature flipper” on the homepage that is powered by categorical XML feeds.

Entercom Communications hired me on last year to deploy WordPress themes for each of their “Music 2.0″ websites. This “Music 2.0″ project was a larger re-think and development of new sites across Entercom’s many markets. It included over 60 radio stations throughout the U.S. and every single one required a WordPress blog theme to accomidate multiple users. All blogs are hosted on a single installation of WordPress MU, and rendered using various plugins tested by me. These sites also employ the use of a specialized Domain mapping tool, as they are all located on different URLs. While some designs are quite inspiring, others seem lacking. All in all, however, this was more a test of large-scale blog deployment, which proved quite successful.

Samples from Portland’s alternative rock station 94/7 are provided below.

Recently a winery in Northern California, Murphy-Goode Winery, hosted an online video submission contest called AReallyGoodeJob.com. This was my submission. It was written, directed, videographed, produced and editted by me with the assistance of Cole Gamble (copy writer), Christina Collada (actor), and Joe VanWaardenberg (actor). The cencept was based on conveying my social networking/media knowledge, writing, branding, and sense of humor. Accompanying this video was a small self-branding piece as well utilizing MaxIsGoode.com (now redirected).

Attached below is one of the many designs used for the branding, site, and collateral.

997kiss.com was developed for Entercom Communications. This site uses both Drupal and WordPress content management. I was responsible for the WordPress aspects, which re-post blogs from syndicated radio hosts on this station. Basically the blogs are automated and re-post from feeds off of the host’s originating blog. It’s somewhat difficult to ensure the stability, however the station had no one to maintain their content locally and required a fully-automated method.

Spring-boarding from the WP-Cumulus plugin, developed by Roy Tanck, this theme utilizes the core files of that plugin. However it is re-appropriated for theme titles, providing a “cloud computing”, yet clean, look for users. This is available in the WordPress Theme Directory.
This theme is not for serious content bloggers. The home page employs a flash piece courtesy of WP Cumulus….but I’ve broken it apart a bit. Whether you set 1 or 100 posts to be on your home page, all the titles will file into this flash cloud interface.

WRKO.com proved to be both a technicaly and personal challenge for me. On the technical front, we developed the site using Drupal for content management. I had some expereince with Drupal, however not enough to build an entire site. Brian Smith and Dan Muzyka, my colleages at Entercom, assisted and developed with large portions of this site. I mainly did Drupal themeing with some minor moderate-level development. As for personal challenges, this project both weighed heavy on my time management and on my personal beliefs. However, I was able to manage myself efficiently and respectfully without any hiccups. Upon site launch, the Entercom Boston team was very pleased with their new site.

Another project completed under Entercom Communications, this site was deployed for a 90′s Rock station in Sacramento, Ca. The station had previously been KWOD but underwent a format-flip to become KBZC. This wordpress theme was created and plugged into the Entercom WordPress MU installation. While the site is stable and functions well, this was merely an enhanced place-holder until the site is totally redone using the combined Drupal, Intertechmedia, WordPress method.

Cubanisimo Vineyards requested my services in creating a blog for their winery website, as well as assisting in moving their site to an ASP-enabled Windows server (For their very out-dated eCommerce provider). This proved difficult as WordPress is developed for a LAMP environment. Finding a Windows server provider that allowed PHP/MySQL solved these issues. I developed a WordPress theme matching the designs of their current site. This also encluded an “events” view for blog posts set as future events.

This site was built using WordPress and mainly the cforms plugin.
Themeing and architecture all generated to client’s spec.
The entire site runs through SSL secure connection over HTTPS. All http requests are rewritten to HTTPS to ensure client confidentiality in all online forms submissions and communication.
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