Barry Moltz site launched on WordPress as a CMS
Kickass Web Design, working as a team with Susan Nigrosh and Laura Roeder, recently launched the BarryMoltz.com website. The graphic design and layout was conceived by Laura and Susan. My job was to make this concept work with WordPress in such a way that Barry, the website owner, would be able to add, edit, and delete content himself in as many areas as possible, similar to how he did on his old site using Contribute.
A highly customized homepage template was used, with widgets controlling four blocks of content so Barry can edit all boxes easily. Other custom page templates were used for all other content developed as Pages, especially the form pages, of which there are four. Custom template tags were developed to handle depth of navigation on this site. Breadcrumb navigation was supplied by a plugin and a template customization. A separate “Page” with its own template was developed to be the blog’s homepage, since Barry wanted the blog to have a standard bloggy type homepage, and since we had a highly customized home template the normal blog template wouldn’t come into play.
WordPress “Pages” were used extensively since this site was originally conceived as a static html site with a typepad blog added to it. I imported the typepad blog into wordpress so everything is handled through one interface, which gives Barry nearly complete control over all content.
The video, which autoloaded directly on the homepage in the old site and is a huge download, was put into its own popup window accessible from the homepage, and visitors were given a choice whether to watch or not. This was done for SEO reasons, because stats on the old site indicated that a lot of visitors were dropping off before ever entering the site. Barry has indicated that he’s already seen improvement there, and it’s only been a short while since we launched.
Do you have a site that’s been underperforming in the Search Engines? Do you have a concept for a site but need the control over your content that a static website can’t offer? Let’s talk.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress as a CMS, WordPress Website Launch, Barry Moltz, Custom WordPress Theme
