About the Author

Tessa Blakeley Silver has prior experience in print design and traditional illustration. She evolved over the years into web and multi-media development, where she focuses on usability and interface design.

Prior to starting her consulting and development company hyper3media (pronounced hyper-cube media) http://hyper3media.com, Tessa was the VP of Interactive Technologies at eHigherEducation, an online learning and technology company developing compelling multimedia simulations, interactions, and games which met online educational requirements like 508, AICC and SCORM. She has also worked as a consultant and freelancer for J. Walter Thompson and the Diamond Trading Company (formerly known as DeBeers) and was a Design Specialist and Senior Associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers' East Region Marketing department.

Tessa has authored a few books for Packt Publishing, including WordPress 2.8 Theme Design and Joomla 1.5 Template Design.

I send a huge "thank you" to the Packt team who have made this title possible and whose help in getting it out into the world has been invaluable. Special thanks to Chaitanya and Thorsten for their editing work. Additional big-time "thank you" goes out to Vincila for the backbreaking work and diligence it takes to keep to a schedule.

I'd also like to thank the exemplary WordPress and jQuery community (Matt and John, you guys Rock) and all who participate and power the Open Source world and strive to improve the accessibility of the Web for all.

Additional thanks goes out to my very patient partner and our little daughter (who's not so patient) who per usual, spent quite a few evenings without me while I worked on this title. I love you both and appreciate your flexibility with me while I work on interesting books and projects (yes, I'm working on getting better at estimating how much time it really, really takes to write a chapter).