Red|Twenty

www.icm.org.au

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:34:44 +0000

After launching the new site, ICM (my full-time employer) provided excellent feedback as to what their customers were saying about the website and how they were accessing the information. This was further supported by the figures I was getting from the Google Analytics report.

As a result we made the following observations:

The site, whilst looking good, was a little dark and looked a bit like a “hobby” site rather than other professional RTO sites
Most people used the search box to find info but were finding it hard to locate
None of the clients or staff understood the purpose of the “tag cloud” to find information
The drop-down category box made it too much effort to use this feature as the information was not on clear display
Clients had to click through at least one link to find our phone number
The main menu bar was dark, small and out of sight at the top of the page
The page was too wide for some browsers
The images were too big for mobile browsers
It was time consuming creating each of the ad boxes on the front page

With all this in mind I created the much simpler theme you see now and made the following structural changes:

The site is narrower with smaller images
The menu bar is larger and a main feature in the page
The search box is clearer and at the top of the page
The drop-down categories are replaced with an unordered list
Our contact info is displayed clearly in the sidebar
The tag cloud is gone
The ad boxes are now widget areas that are much quicker to create content for

The site is a lot brighter and cleaner so appears to be more professional. As usual visitor using Firefox will see a slightly nicer theme as I have made the most of the various toolkits for non-ie browsers.

The background image is created in much the same way as big portal sites such as yahoo and bigpond and can be changed on a daily basis if required.

Matias Interactive

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:03:53 +0000

This client wanted their Moodle installation to look like their main website so I did a quick theme the replicated both the background image and navbar graphic in the moodle skin.

I replaced the standard Moodle header text with a corporate logo that links back to the front page. The only headache with this was the fact that I forgot that I needed to put a php echo in the html so that it new which theme folder to look in for the image. Once I rmembered that things fell into place nicely…

MCforNC

admin — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:51:59 +0000

This commercial site for the not-for-profit organisation Micro-Consulting for North Carolina came with specific instructions to reproduce their existing CSS & HTML site as closely as possible within WordPress.

The actual site was easy enough but provided me with some challenged when it came to the content and navbar.

Main Content

The first problem here was getting the rounded white boxes within the blue outer box within the white layout. The easiest fix would have been to colour the main layout with a white background and then set left and right padding to provide a border around the content. The problem with this is the layout padding would have also set a border around the header and navbar. Eventually I settled with a white layout, individually coloured sidebar and center column with radius corners and a 20px white border.

The second problem was the second box in the center column on the home page. fortunately Atahualpa makes this easy with the facility to embed new widget areas anywhere in the layout. a page_if php filter restricts the widget to the home page.

NavBar

The navbar was a new problem for me. The client wanted a simple bar with accent lines between the items but not at the terminal ends. This caused quite a bit of head-scratching but was eventually solved by adding a 2px white border to the left of each

item and then adding a border-style: none; to the current_page_item class filtered to only the home page item.

You can view the production site here >>> http://www.mcfornc.org/MCNC_WPwebsite/

www.redtwenty.net

admin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 03:09:56 +0000

After spending a couple of hours downloading and installing custom fonts I decided to give some of them a go by doing a quick redesign of the RedTwenty site.

I used the latest version of Atahualpa (3.53) and tweaked the code a bit to make it suit my purposes (that darn navbar again as usual).

The result is a clean and quick loading page that has a kind of “rough draft” feel to it.

No I have to get on with my paying jobs

Mahara Shared Hosting Fix

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:06:18 +0000

It’s a bit of a diversion from my normal WordPress passion but I have been working on an installation of Mahara for my day-job.

Mahara is a fantastic ePortfolio system (open source of course) that allows users to create online résumés, RPL applications, portfolios, social communities – it really is very cool

The main problem though is that it is primarily designed for institutions running their own Linux servers with postresql. If you try to do a default installation on shared hosting with a mySQL database it will simply not work at all

After a few days of head scratching I eventually found some instructions hidden in a developers forum that allowed me to make the necessary modifications to get Mahara up and running on a shared hosting account with a mySQL database – HOORAY!!!

In the spirit of Open Source development, I am making the files I created available for other users right here >>> mahara_patch

Full instructions are contained in the READ_ME.txt file.

Good luck and feel free to ask questions…

Elance prebid site

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:28:21 +0000

So, sometimes you have to create a site for a client in order to prove to the client that you can create a site for the client. Get it? Nope, well at least it gives me something to do, exercise my talents and challenge my skills.

This job was posted on the Elance site, the client asking for his old site to be replicated in WordPress. My bid was simple – give me a link to the old site and I’ll recreate it in WordPress. The client sent me the link and it took me a couple of hours to recreate the site.

New skills I learnt on this one were how to place the rotating banner image so that it only displays on the home page and no others. This used a nice little bit of code:

“ %image ”

The other new idea I got to play with on this one was the use of custom menus in WP3.0 and placing widget areas inside the footer.

I had a bit of trouble with the style tags on the footer widgets (and I still am to be honest), but I am pretty happy with the site so far.

Now all I need is for the client to email me and offer me the gig…

www.lmmac.net theme modification

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:54:29 +0000

After considering the previous theme for this website looked too cold and uninviting I decided to create a “Twitter” style theme that would be simple, elegant, quick to load and easy to modify.

The result only took a couple of hours to complete and looks great. I tried a couple of different backgrounds to see which one works best, and will probably try more in the future as I find/take interesting photos.

Probably the most complicated thing to do with this theme was pulling the logo and page menu above the main layout. By using negative margins this was fairly easy to accomplish and meant that I could use a solid colour and -moz radius to create the corners on the layout container (of course, this only displays in Firefox, ie8 will still be square – at least until we get ie9).

www.moodle.icm.org.au

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:36:25 +0000

This one took me about 5 minutes. Mainly because I already had the CSS done and the layout made in GIMP from the main site. All I actually had to do was sort out the images to fit and then tweak the CSS to make everything display properly.

I really like this Moodle installation now. Of course, the actual content is taking me ages to get right but then, that’s my day job

www.lmmac.net

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:11:16 +0000

I have recently rebuilt the site for my flying club. Once again using my favourites – WordPress 3.0 and Atahualpa 3.51.

I find that by using this combination of CMS and theme as a base I can customise to achieve pretty much any effect I want in a page that is easy to use and quick to load.

The usualy plugins are in there. I have considered utilising Buddypress on this site to give it a more social interation but to be honest, the people that are visiting the site are either one time visitors looking for information or club members who are fairly technically challenged! For this reason, the easier it is to find the information the better.

I have made it possible for people to register with this site so they can create their own post. It works well under strict moderation but we do attract a lot of comment spam. The plugin WP-Spam Free deals with this very well though and my administration is minimal.

Problems with this site? The new theme does look a little “cold” to me. I think I need to convert the background image back to colour and try to get some colour into the logo. I am also toying with idea of using a fixed background and scrolling content in a kind of Twitter style.

You can visit this site at www.lmmac.net

www.icm.org.au

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:25:23 +0000

I have just finished and launched the new website for Integrated Care Management (http://www.icm.org.au).

Their old site was a bit of a disaster, it looked terrible and the content did not really tell the visitors anything they needed to know.

The brief was simple: Design a new website that would look bright and inviting with a home page that could be used to advertise current projects. Visitors should then be able to easily navigate their way to the required information quickly and easily.

The site is powered by WordPress 3.0 and themed using a customised version of Atahualpa 3.51. I have included categories, search bar and a tag cloud to make information easy to find. The site also includes Sociable and Content Protection plugins as well as a mobile browser theme plugin and custom contact forms.

The blog displays only one category and as such can be used as a “News” feed.

In the backend I have included google Analytics and Database Manager to make admin and marketing tasks easier. SEO is handled by the themes own SEO generator and Google XML sitemap generator.

An extension of this project is the inclusion of a Moodle LMS that now needs to be skinned to integrate with the main site.