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/

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

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

Cheap Perfume is a well performing affiliate site that was in need of a cosmetic overhaul. Our client liked the design of affiliatestuff.co.uk and had asked for a design with a similar look that would appeal to a female target audience. They offer great deals on perfume too, and the site was designed to compliment the large pictures of elegantly designed perfume bottles.

Cheap-Perfume.co.uk

A good friend of ours, Yvette Hawkins is a poet and an artist who works under the moniker of PaperFaerie. Currently living in the growing city of Newcastle Upon Tyne, she is inspired by the world around her, natural and organic, architectural and structured, aiming to capture the surprising and unknown. She has a BA in Fine Art at Newcastle University, and her favourite material to work with is paper.

She does very well selling her art on etsy.com. We were commisioned to design this logo for her. Designing for artists and musicians is something we love doing,  so if you are a independant creative needing a blog to publicise your work get in touch!