Sandbox Development and Consulting Inc.

url:http://www.macleans.ca/

,

SDAC Inc. provided:

• XHTML/CSS programming
• WordPress CMS/theme
• Custom PHP programming
• Custom AJAX functionality

technologies used:

XHTML, CSS, WordPress, WordPress.com VIP Hosting, PHP, jQuery

front end:

I had worked with Macleans before and created their first WordPress theme for their WordPress CMS. This time around I was given a new mockup for the home page, the category pages, and the single page view. I added in a number of jQuery functions to display the content (featured posts, jappler menus, scroller at the bottom, etc) and worked to simplify everything from CSS to the page logic – to creating easy to use admin pages to add in and control the content in certain content areas.

back end:

This redesign was not just a simple reskin – I spent a lot of time creating custom functions so that updating the site in the future would be much easier and the content could easily be changed by changing a few parameters. I also made nearly everything on the site dynamic and easily editable by creating an admin options page for the editors to easy switch around content in some of the main content areas on the home page without touching any of the template files.

lessons learned/random thoughts:

Overall – this was a great project to work on. I had the chance to do a lot of front end simplification by adding in a number of custom functions that controlled the output while also focusing on creating an easy to use admin options page for the editors who needed to make changes quickly and easily without having to know PHP. I am quite happy with the end result.

After a busy summer – I decided to take a few days to clean up and redesign the SDAC Inc. web site. For the design, I wanted something clean and modern and something that would take full advantage of WordPress’s underpinnings (menus, content area, etc). For the templates, I ended up redoing most of them from scratch in order to simplify everything and make use of more WordPress functions and less third party plugins, created new images, cleaned out the CSS in order to only use what I needed, and made everything as dynamic as possible. On the backend of things, I spent some time cleaning out old database tables and other plugin left overs in order to rid the site of any unused data. I have big plans for the rest of 2008 and 2009 so stay tuned…this is just the beginning.