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!
Playboyz is a blog reviewing gifts for men such as Jewellery, Grooming, Gadgets and Experiences. The Playboyz team had purchased a Revolution Template which has some pretty nifty features – but nothing we cannot recreate ourselves 
– and wanted a cosmetic overhaul to give their site a style unique to them. We gave their logo a quick revamp too.
www.playboyz.co.uk
NRBet is an affiliate site that offers completely risk free bets from various online bookmakers, built with a relatively simple WordPress theme that has a few nifty additions.
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
Great Baby Things is a well thought out blog that attempts to add some real journalism and advice to an affiliate niche with so many automated product websites. Inspired by blogs such as Gizmodo and Uncrate, a lot of modifications have been made to increase the accessibility and functionality of this blog.
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
ISIOTB is a cool site which picks the best products that have appeared on TV recently and provides a guide to where you can buy them. The products listed range from Gadgets to Home Insurance and always provide an interesting read. The site had been using a free template for a while, which did not provide the functionality that our client required.
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
Hi, I’m Dan Cregin. I’m a freelance web developer, designer and SEO consultant, specialising in creating custom themes, plugins and modifications for WordPress. 
