That PHP Girl » css

Romance is in the Air

Nikole — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:27:37 +0000

Callandra Caufield, a wedding planner in the Canadian Rockies, had a dream in her head but no way to bring that to the web … until she teamed up with That PHP Girl, that is! I helped to to give life into the dream down to every last detail, from getting her color scheme just right to fine-tuning the user experience on her site. Her site started out as an install of Royalle by WooThemes, and then was modified with:

Custom backgrounds throughout.
Dropped navigation in the header, expanded wording in the footer.
Replacement header featuring Callandra’s fantastic logo.
A new sidebar that changes from the blog to the static pages, and features a rotating testimonial and social media icons.
SEO helpers like the WPSEO plugin, sitemaps, and search engine pinging.
New blog formatting to suit Callandra’s needs.
Custom WordPress templates for blog archives, recent posts and testimonials.

The end result is the launch of Cherry Tree Occasions — Wedding Planner to the Wildly Romantic! I think all the small details on this site make it one of my favorites. Callandra and I really came together as a team to make this site great!

“Small Changes” and Theme Purchases

Nikole — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:29:05 +0000

I helped a friend out with some small changes to his site recently, Selling the Startup, and it reminded me what happens when a "quick fix" turns into a major problem. Sometimes themes can be a gamble—just like purchasing the services of any web company—so it is important to check out reviews and references before signing your name on the line. I’ve had great luck with all of the Woo Themes I have used so far, but there are a lot of people out there making Wordpress themes for purchase now. I don’t like to pick on anyone, but it just gets to be a problem when a theme is blocking the display of a user-installed plugin or widget, forcing me to redo the CSS or change the code to make it work. This is just frustrating for me as a developer, and frustrating to a client who has to pay for a simple modification that turns out to be anything but simple.

Of course, if you do get stuck, I’m always here to help. And Mark, go ahead and tweet your heart out now.

Hear Florida – A Joomla to WordPress Conversion

Nikole — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:37:32 +0000

Just being a developer who makes web sites is not enough—I have to think like a marketing/sales person and consider the long-term success potential of a site. I’m sure a lot of people like Joomla, and I’ve done some work on it for clients, but I’m not the biggest fan. There are just many things I find lacking, and among them are website marketing potential and client ease of use in terms of manipulating content. This is why I suggested converting Hear Florida from a Joomla site to a custom WordPress template when Michelle of 1Stop Marketing Solutions came to me asking for help upgrading the site for better marketing and SEO.

To recreate Hear Florida in WordPress and upgrade it to the client’s needs, I pulled out the base HTML and CSS from what I believe was a modified YooTheme template, along with the content. I then …

Configured the site to use permalinks.
Removed all layout-based tables from the content, and generally cleaned up the HTML and CSS for the site. (Tables displaying tabular data were retained.)
Installed and activated the WPSEO and Google Sitemaps plugins.
Used the Google Maps API to create location pages which put the logo and address on a point on live maps. Each map point includes that location’s logo and contact information.
Added a blog with a feed and Feedburner connection. The blog features several custom archive page templates, including a category listing, a single page, and an all-posts listing.
Added social media connections (Twitter, Facebook, AddThis) to the sidebar and the blog posts.
Created a newsletter signup form for use with a custom newsletter template.
Made a dynamic sidebar to load content as it is added by the content admin.
Created a Q & A section which includes a form to ask questions, a format for reading the answers to previous questions, and social media connections for sharing the content.
Organized the site and navigation for clarity, ease of use, and elimination of redundancy.

Overall, all parties are pleased with the result and I am confident that this new version of the Hear Florida site will prove to have better longevity and marketability for the company.