Five Hours. Five People. Five Days.

Wha wha wha….?

Before & After

So what’s with the 5’s? I’ll get to it in just a moment. A potential client sent me specs for a job. The criteria was mostly content and functionality. They wanted a way to offer workshop courses via some sort of Ecommerce mod as well as a solution to sell their books. Had to run on a particular payment gateway rather than the standard PayPal. While I normally don’t like to use plugins or modules for Ecommerce, the product is simple as apposed to complex product, so I decided this time, why not! Found and tested a solution that worked well and was easy enough to use. An addition of an events booking module I’ve used before and the criteria was met.

Their current website lacked pretty much any aspect of design. Sometimes that works great if wanting to just present a textual information site. I’ve always looked a website in a more conceptual way. If you have a website, you’re in showbiz. That’s really what it all comes down to in the end. If you want to entice someone to do something, make it sexy and appealing. Adding simplicity to the mix makes it easy for today’s rush and seek web surfing populous to navigate and employ the at-a-glance method of finding the relevant content they need.

So what’s with the 5’s? Keep still..I’m getting to it! The series of tools that I use every day allow me to create things in an upscale manner and rather quickly. The modules and custom entities that I’ve developed also make things easier for the end user who manages the website. For example all of the content on the front page pictured here is controlled by very basic WP  features and apps. The large rectangular image on top is managed by a well made and simple slider app. The small squares that I refer to as PromoBoxes are easily updated by creating a new post and merchandising it in the appropriate category, in this example with Featured 1, Featured 2, Featured 3 or Featured 4 respectively. For this featured I ripped apart an existing plugin I’ve used for years and added some additional coding to it. I also employed additional CSS that makes this group of boxes responsive like the rest of the site.

Adding the theater elements to the design only seemed natural.

What about those 5’s?

I say this with no ego involved, only confidence in myself….
What would take 5 days, for a team of 5 people to accomplish, took me only 5 hours!