The Best “Staff Directory” Page
| September 3, 2012 | Recent Projects |
The folks at Illuminage approached me recently, with the following goal: We need to make the best possible “Staff Directory” page and we need to be able to package it up as a plugin for future projects. Of course, my mind began to race with ideas for leveraging custom post types, custom taxonomies, custom menus,… more
Marler Blog WP Migration
| September 2, 2012 | Recent Projects |
Bill Marler is the best known food safety attorney in the world. At Lexblog, we’ve been undertaking to move his blogs to WordPress. It’s been a blast because he has so much content, and posts so frequently, that we have to work extra hard to make sure his posts are easy to create and easy… more
Bob Silver WP Build
| September 1, 2012 | Recent Projects |
I’m working full-time at Lexblog now, building WordPress themes and plugins. We recently launched a website for PR guru Bob Silver. It’s a clean design with a few key features worth highlighting. The priority here is to make the site easy to manage. We want to show some teaser content on the homepage, but not… more
New WordPress Plugin: Fade In Like Google
| June 25, 2012 | wordpressery |
I made another wordpress plugin: Fade In Like Google. You know how, when you go to google, the page, like, FADES IN? Don’t you wish that effect could occur on your home page? I know I do! Now it can! The repository. more
New WordPress Plugin: Enlarge Text
| June 7, 2012 | wordpressery |
Need a way to allow users to increase the size of the text on your site? This plugin is for you! It’s true that this feature is native to most browsers, but I’ve found that the population that needs larger text is sometimes less savvy when it comes to browser settings. This plugin makes it… more
Alaska Brain Injury Network WordPress Build
| March 28, 2012 | Uncategorized |
Conditionality: Imposing, depending on, or containing a condition. If this, then that. It’s fitting that the client on this project is in neurological health, because this custom wordpress template is making decisions on every page load. The design is by Billy Finley of Couloir Graphics; it’s a WordPress site. Is this is a generic page?… more
WA Ombudsman WordPress Build
| March 27, 2012 | Recent Projects |
You give me a layered file, I give you a wordpress site. How much it costs depends on the complexity of the design; how long it takes depends on my coffee supply. This project, the Washington State Long Term Care Ombudsman Program site, fell right into my comfort zone. The design, from Illuminage Communication Partners,… more
NWRC WordPress Build
| March 27, 2012 | Recent Projects |
I’ve been working for Illuminage lately, building wordpress sites based on mockups from their design squad. For the Northwest Regional Council project, I implemented a couple of special features. NWRC is document-heavy when it comes to public-facing content. They have surveys, publications, spreadsheets, and Word docs. These are displayed as “highlights” on the homepage. If… more
Shopify: Let’s Get It On.
| March 2, 2012 | Filled under Recent Projects |
I’ll say this about e-commerce platforms: If it’s something you can download (perhaps from a vendor or a plugin repository) and upload to your own server (example: WP E-Commerce), then it’s probably extremely flexible. You can probably integrate it into any page template you can imagine. You will never have to say, “No, we can’t use that design because this shopping cart won’t work with it”.
That said, it’s also likely to be less reliable. It’s on your server, you’ve been tweaking the server-side code, it might be in an environment that the developers did not anticipate, and, bottom line, the developers haven’t had their hands on it since you downloaded it. Case in point: I recall installing a self-hosted cart for a client and being amazed that all of his orders were coming from Alabama. Who buys boutique neon watches in Alabama? Then I realized that every order was getting stored with Alabama as its shipping state.
Not cool.
I personally reached out to every single customer that day and set things right. Then we switched to a hosted solution: Shopify.
With Shopify, I don’t own the server side code. They host it; I never even see it. As a result of this, I admit, I have had to tell clients, “No, we can’t use that design because this shopping cart can’t work with it.” But their fulfillment departments are flawlessly handling hundreds of orders per day, and none of the customers seem to mind that various design subtleties have been rejected.
And there is some margin for customization in Shopify. Originally, I never thought I would get The Personalizor to add-to-cart in this environment. But I dug into the API and got it done.
Shopify: It's 100% reliable and about 80% flexible. I'll take it.
Getting Creative with WordPress Custom Page Templates
| September 7, 2011 | Filled under Recent Projects, wordpressery |
Shocking Goat, a Seattle watch designer for whom I regularly work, is picking up steam. They have photographed a growing number of celebrities wearing their watches and were looking for a way to show them off. I was initially inspired by the FolioGrid premium WordPress theme, but in the end, my code is much different.
The overall effect is a semi-chaotic grid, somewhat like a Tetris game. The images are generated from a user-defined shape, and positioned in the grid by a user-defined offset, using CSS positioning.
The celebrity grid is just chaotic enough so as to be eye-catching. The admin user has complete control over where and how the images are displayed.
Each of these images are actually a post thumbnail from a wordpress post, assigned to the “Celebrity” category. The celebrity page is a custom page template that taps into custom post meta, as shown below:
The Celebrity page picks up on these custom meta values.
Lastly, I am using CSS3 transitions to provide an attractive overlay:
The CSS3 transition property allows this overlay to appear gradually, as the user hovers or clicks on the image.
Betsy Barnum’s Reverie Studio
| August 11, 2011 | Filled under Recent Projects |
I love working with artists. It frees up the poorly developed right hemisphere of my brain so that I can devote 100% of my computational power to the CSS and server-side code. Betsy Barnum, in addition to being a personal friend, is the most talented painter I have ever worked with. more
AERAdventures.com
| July 18, 2011 | Filled under Recent Projects |
AER Adventures is a new tour operator here in Alaska, with operations also in the lower 48. They already had a great design on the wordpress platform when they approached me for some work; they just needed me to fix some layout bugs and integrate a few more features. more
Just Say It