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.

WordPress is often still regarded as blogging software, however with an easily modified open source structure and massive user base; it’s certainly no longer limited to creating blogs.

With the huge variety of open source modifications and plugins available, WordPress is rapidly becoming a flexible content management system that offers functionality to rival most other CMS, and we’ve noticed many people switch to wordpress because of its ease of use, especially when it comes to integrating it with social media apps like Twitter and Facebook.

Gadgetspy.co.uk is a very successful gadget blog. Originally built in Drupal, we were asked to transfer the blog from Drupal to the WordPress platform. Unlike many other blogging platforms/CMS available, it is not a simple matter of running a script to transfer posts and all data across to WordPress.

There are some mySQL scripts available which will do a very basic job, but simply running a script will often end in categories being mismatched with posts, “tags” and “categories” being merged together, and any Drupal modules have the potential to create havoc, as they will store pictures/links or any other content separately and basic scripts will miss them out. This means you really need to tailor the mySQL commands used to suite the specific blog you are moving.

We’ll go into this further in an upcoming tutorial.

After transferring the site we did a full redesign of the Gadgetspy site, it’s always nice to redesign an existing blog, as you have a full and “finished” looking website from the start. On that note, it’s always nice to see new blogs grow too!

www.playboyz.co.uk

We updated Mark’s logo, designed and built this theme with a dropdown jQuery menu as a slick addition to a simple layout. One feature that was required was an ability to put an expiry date on posts and there was no plugins available to do this in a satisfactory manner.

The idea was to have individual posts that would only stay present on the homepage as long as they were in date; after this date they would disappear from the homepage, but still show in the archives, and still be accessible at their original URL for SEO purposes.

We created a bespoke code for this that we will shortly be adding to our tutorial section.

www.nrbet.com

We provided a clean uncluttered design and then added features such as an “alternate view” – which allows users to choose to view the website as a grid of images, a magazine style list of posts – or as a standard blog with the full posts scrolling down the page.

Many usefull plugins have also been integrated to give users, numerous ways to access each post. and jquery has been used to create a dynamic dropdown menu. There have also been a number of modifications to simplify the use of the site for the owner.

Hopefully if time permits we’ll be introducing a series of tutorials to show how we created some of the features on this blog.

www.greatbabythings.com

Mike from ISIOTB loved the functional and “2.0” design of UKOffer.com and so our design was created on this basis, tweaking the design to incorporate a TV based theme. First draughts went along the lines of old TV test cards, but the result was too garish so then later toned down to only a suggestion of test card colours within the navigation.

Isawitonthebox.com

Cheap-Perfume.co.uk

The blog part of the wordpress theme has taken a back seat in this design to emphasise the important part of the site, providing information about all airports and destinations used by Flybe. The design demonstrates that wordpress on its own can be used to build full websites, and not just blogs. This means the whole site is fully updatable without rebuilding html web pages.

Quite a bit bespoke code was written for this, as the theme has been designed to display different external and internal links depending on the page being viewed. A user can click on an airport, read a full page of information and be provided links to only the destinations that are available for that particular airport. It’s this kind of information packed website that will prove to be successful for affiliates as google cracks down on single landing page websites that only exist to redirect traffic.

http://www.flybe-destinations.com/

Jules.tv is a blog we have designed for a top TV director and producer, who works with many channels including BBC, SKY One and MTV on programs such as Pimp my Ride. The blog’s purpose is to offer advice on the latest camera and TV productions techniques, reviews of equipment and news in the media industry.

Currently there are 6 repeating images across the top which are placeholders for jules.tv to add 6 top equipment picks which will link to individual equipment reviews. After a number of experiments, we did not make this section dynamic, as the link to an old post may need to stay on top for a while. We’ve used the WPAds plugin for this section so images and links can be altered easily by the blogger.

The homepage has been given a “magazine” style where a title, image and user defined “excerpt” is displayed  instead of the full post to allow for more content to be displayed. A TinyMCE plugin was used to upgrade the functionality of the wordpress admin’s excerpt editor, and bespoke code added to automatically link any image within the excerpt to link to the full post.

The sidebar was fully customised with bespoke graphics, but the client required the ability to add further “widgets” to the sidebar in the future. For this we added code so widgets can be placed underneath the customised sidebar.

www.jules.tv