OneWordSurveys.com

The Site

OneWordSurveys.com is a site as simple as it’s concept: Simple (one word) answers to simple questions. The site poses simple questions to users, all with one word answers. Questions like “Soda or Pop?”, “Coke or Pepsi?”, “Biscuits or Muffins?”, and much, much more. The site also provides a means for users to submit their own surveys as well.

The Design

As you can see from visiting the site, the design is not overly complicated. The client wanted to focus on the surveys and make them as visible as possible and make voting simple. This meant a clean and simple design making the posts highly visible in the overall design. The theme chosen is called SimpleX and is provided by WPShoppe.com.

Only minor changes were made to the theme and installed plugins on the website after the initial design. Most of these were simply aesthetic changes at the request of the client. In addition to standard performance plugins, we also developed a plugin to allow all posts to be posted directly to the client’s Twitter account as well as also posting directly to the client’s Facebook page setup for OneWordSurveys.com. Lastly, we also customized a contact form plugin so that when a user submits a survey of their own, it will automatically create the survey and schedule the post within the database, thus automating the website further. At this point, all the client has to do is double check the post before it’s scheduled post time.

Overall, this site was a very quick and easy site we developed for the client. However, as you can see, and as the client can attest to with the automation, quick and easy does not always sacrifice quality. This site took approximately 5 hours to complete.

OneWordSurveys.com includes the following services:

• HTML
• PHP
• CSS
• Javascript
• AJAX
• MySQL
• Customized WordPress Blog
• WordPress Theme Customization
• WordPress Plugin Development

FreeAdviceForCharity.com

The Site

FreeAdviceForCharity.com is a a site based out of Phoenix, AZ that looks to give back to it’s visitor’s, more than most sites on the internet usually do. The basis behind FreeAdviceForCharity.com is that the sites team of professional financial advisors provide FREE financial advice to it’s visitors and ask nothing in return, aside from a request to donate to Rotary International’s PolioPlus Fund. The Mission Statement of the site is:

FreeAdviceForCharity.com is to provide the best quality advice for individuals regarding various financial needs while at the same time promoting local charities and building a stronger community.

The Design

When I was initially approached by the client about this site, his description of the site he wanted was one where he could provide financial information and articles to his visitors on a regular basis. He wanted to be able to continue to update the content and keep it fresh. Immediately my thoughts turned to WordPress to create a blog site. What better way to continually update the site and information for visitor’s without needing all the technical expertise and know-how to do so?

The client was initially turned off a bit by the idea of a blog. I believe this was mainly due to the misconceptions of the usefulness and power of a blog, in addition to the poor image that blogs have received due to the over-saturation of blogs on the internet. Many of the blogs out there are poor in design and (especially) content. Once I started to show the client the power of a WordPress blog, and the fact that they can be altered so that the site does not even look like your “traditional” blog, he became more open to the prospect.

When starting a professional blog-based site, I think the first step is finding a theme that you like and fits your needs. I searched all over for a good financial-based theme and presented the client with a number of ideas to go off of. He finally decided on not a financial theme, but a travel based theme from EZWPthemes.com.. This site provides a number of great looking WordPress themes for free.

After nailing down the theme, next came the customization. If you compare the above theme to the current site, you’ll notice a number of differences. These include changes made to the header to make it a financial theme, replacement of the image in the recent post section with the Mission Statement and info box, and the replacement of the Gallery on the left with multiple other modules.

After the customization of the theme, it was time to start working on the content for the site; content other than the main blog posts. This included a Request a Consultation page with custom JavaScript and AJAX built into the request form. The other main piece of development was the “Did You Know?” module on the left hand side. Visitor’s will be presented with various “Did You Know?” facts as they travel throughout the site. This was a custom WordPress Plugin we developed specifically for this site. The client has the ability to log into his WordPress dashboard and add new quotes, edit existing quotes, or delete existing quotes, all of which are stored in a separate table within the WordPress database itself. With the WordPress Plugin API, plugin development is pretty simple as it is mostly just basic PHP programming that utilizes the hooks built into WordPress. You will also notice the “Meet With An Advisor” module on the left hand side. We are currently working on another plugin to allow this data to be changed by the client as well.

Overall this was not a complicated site, as WordPress makes it very easy to launch websites in short amounts of time. This site took just over 18 hours to complete, most of which was spent on the theme customization and plugin development.

FreeAdviceForCharity.com includes the following services:

• HTML
• PHP
• CSS
• Javascript
• AJAX
• MySQL
• Customized WordPress Blog
• WordPress Theme Customization
• WordPress Plugin Development

AllOutdoorsPhotography.com

The Site

AllOutdoorsPhotography.com is an online photo gallery displaying the photographs of Mesa, AZ photographer Gus Koernig. Gus’s portfolio features photographs from around the United States, including Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Carolina, and more, as well as Australia and New Zealand. AllOutdoorsPhotography.com focuses on capturing the beauty of the world that we live, from Mountains to Streams, Waterfalls to Seascapes, Sunrises and Sunsets to Cityscapes, these images will take your breath away. All photos on the site are available for sale with options of a print only or a beautiful museum-style mounting for easy display. All photos come hand-signed by the photographer.

The Design

Our design process for AllOutdoorsPhotography.com started a little different than most. First off, Gus was fairly open to the design of the site and didn’t really have anything in particular in mind with regards to the layout/design of the site. This left us not only with an option to experiment, but also didn’t give us a lot of direction to start with either. The ultimate goal of the site was to display the images in a gallery format with the implementation of a shopping cart functionality to allow for the purchase of the photos.

We started out by coming up with a number of different layout ideas in a process called “wireframing.” Wireframing involves creating

“black-and-white diagrams that illustrate blocks of content, navigation, or functionality…used as a tool to communicate content and structure without the distractions of color and imagery.”

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke

Here’s an example of some of our wireframes

With a layout selected by Gus, we set forth on creating our website comps. The comps were the basic structure and layout of the site as actual web pages for Gus to get a feel for how the selected wireframe would translate to an actual working web site. The comps were designed in basic HTML and CSS and, once approved by Gus, were very easy to convert into PHP by taking our duplicate content (page headers, footers, and navigation bars) and copying them into a PHP include file. This took care of the majority of the site

The remainder (and bulk) of the site involved displaying the photos from stored database information and creating the shopping cart. By storing the image information in a database, it allows Gus to login to the CMS we created for him to upload new photos, remove existing, change prices, on his own. It also cuts down on the amount of code required for each page of the site. From there, it was simply a matter of creating the shopping cart (which is not as easy as I’m making it sound) for purchasing the orders. There are a lot of caveats to creating a custom shopping cart and, as a designer/developer, you need to make sure that all of those are covered. I won’t cover those here, but let’s just say that the attention to detail is a high priority and can make or break a custom shopping cart. For more information about creating shopping carts, I recommend Constructing Usable Shopping Carts by Clifton Evans, Jody Kerr, and Jon Stephens

All in all, the site for AllOutdoorsPhotography.com took us approximately 45 hours to complete and included the following services:

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• PHP
• AJAX
• MySQL
• Flash
• Custom Shopping Cart
• Custom CMS
• Logo Design