Baltic Blog Design create unique custom themes for WordPress blogs

Baby Deco is just a great idea all round – The main idea is for new parents and expecting mums to share their Nursery Room creations online by supplying a photo and links to any products they have used to create their special ‘look’.

The site also provides DIY tips, shopping guides and all manner of baby related articles to visitors.

Custom page designs dependent on category were needed to differentiate between article, product and nursery pages.

We chose to allow posts for individual products, so they could be categorised, tagged and have all the features of a wordpress post available to them. Products then can be “liked” on facebook, commented on and sorted in numerous ways, using custom fields for details such as pricing and affiliate links to the merchant.

Products needed to be associated with a particular nursery room and displayed on each nursery room page, we achieved this again using custom fields.

All these features alone make for a really interesting take on an affiliate blog that encourages social interaction and collaboration; A blog that becomes more than just a chronological list of “reviewed” products.

However our client wanted more. The site was to include thousands of related products, all provided by an XML feed from affiliate partners such as http://www.webgains.com/

Price Tapestry is a great way to turn your affiliate site into a ‘shopping portal’ where visitors can browse and compare thousands of products on your site before selecting their required product and being transported to the merchant where they can buy the product for a great price.

Price Tapestry has the power to act as your own ‘comparison’ site operating similar to bigger, well known sites. When an affiliate site addresses a niche market and also allows price comparison, web users can really benefit from visiting and find a great bargain in the process.

Integrating Price Tapestry with WordPress provides a great user experience, though it’s important to note that we do not fully integrate them as they remain separate pieces of software. The programs use separate databases and preferably are stored in separate folders but they both are “styled” to look identical or better – we just use one stylesheet for the design of both WordPress and PT.

It is perfectly possible however to pull information from Price Tapestry into WordPress and vice versa, allowing more visible integration such as displaying relevant products linked to a blog post.

With Baby Deco, products associated with each nursery were not guaranteed to be in affiliate feeds so Babydeco.co.uk has two sets of products: WordPress products for products associated with each Nursery, and a general product database provided by Price Tapestry.

This presented a few problems for categorisation and search which we solved by using re-directs so when a search term is entered the term is searched for in WordPress and then Price Tapestry.

http://babydeco.co.uk/

Coats.org.uk is a great example of a modern affiliate website. It focuses on a niche market, it has regularly updated and interesting content and has all the relevant social media integrated into the site including twitter and facebook widgets. It has a jquery “featured” carousel, which is becoming increasingly popular with many websites.

The only thing this site needed was an appropriate design, which we were glad to help with!

http://www.coats.org.uk

Martin from the NEC already had the right idea, he had built his company website using wordpress as a CMS and just needed a great theme design to make it pop.

Since the NEC provide events management and equipment for a massive range of party entertainment – from paintball and foam cannons to bouncy castles and rodeo – it was not hard to be inspired when coming up with design ideas for this site.

First we asked about the websites wide target market, as NEC’s services range from Stag and Student Events to Children’s parties, which would usually demand very different designs.

We then asked which sections of the market needed addressing most. From here we could focus the design on its target audience without alienating other potential customers.

After building the site we integrated it with a popular email marketing client, to allow Martin to create email campaigns around various products. We connected google maps and provided SEO advice which we will be following up on as his site develops.

http://national-entertainment.com/

Search Kingdom is a great resource for SEO knowledge which is definitely worth reading for anyone who wants to get more traffic to their site. The blog instantly clears away many of the myths surrounding SEO and keeps strictly to the facts we know about the top search engine algorithms and various practical tips to ensure your site is optimised.

We were asked to do a Medieval theme and this was the design that  our customer loved. The landscape contracts and expands to fit different browser sizes and is cross compatible in numerous browsers despite using .png files and z-index to create the layered effect.

Etoys.co.uk was originally a simple ShopWindow site that required a revamp to bring it up to date and achieve better SEO.

ShopWindow is a great affiliate software client that uses its API to query the Affiliate Window product database of over 4 million products. An affiliate can literally upload the client to his web space and have an “instant” online retail site selling a massive range of products that updates in real time.

The caveat to this is that the basic layout and templates are hugely generic, and relatively basic in design. The initial shop feed is far too diverse to be good for SEO, and I’m also sure by now that search engines would probably not take much notice of the generic version. Affiliate Window is also aware of this and has quite rigorous criteria an affiliate needs to pass before they can use the software to it’s full extent.

If you want to achieve success with the software, the trick is (as always) to make sure you provide relevant and fresh content, and what better way than to integrate it with a WordPress blog?

Etoys.co.uk limits its product feed to toys, and that already provides an SEO advantage. As our client feels the domain name and the ShopWindow client are already doing a good job of achieving a low bounce rate, we decided to keep the ShopWindow client on the front page and pull through the latest two posts from the WordPress blog. This gives the site better SEO and provides users with a more informative and interesting shopping experience, while still allowing quick access to the huge range of toys available. The full blog is then available on its own page and has been seamlessly integrated with the shop window client.

For the design we kept to original bright playful colours, updating the logo and site layout and adding a few jquery widgets. The integration of WordPress also allowed us to create all necessary social media to further increase SEO.