Please review my iPad accessories site

  • Hi All,

    I’d love your feedback on what is my most advanced work with WordPress yet. I’ve been building this slowly over the past 6 months and finally feel like it is ready for people to inspect ??

    My background is in web design, Graphics, HTML and CSS, so this project has challenged me to learn a little about PHP, Javascript and some server side things such as getting caching plugins working correctly.

    The site is called iPad Accessories and I’ll give you a brief rundown of how I’ve put it together.

    Perhaps the most unusual thing I have done with this site is that I have used tags for the main taxonomy and navigation, even the homepage is a tags page. It really seemed the best approach initially, however, it has created a number of headaches, mainly with lack of support for custom meta in tag pages, and in retrospect I’m not sure it was the easiest method, though everythign worked out in the end. I will probably go back to categories for my next site.

    The theme is a customised version of Motion, a beautiful and free WordPress theme available here: https://www.ads-software.com/extend/themes/motion

    The main change I made was to add a dark panel behind the post area – to lift the text a little. You can compare to the original, where the tesxt os directly over the background here: https://wp-themes.com/?p=36

    I also created my own logo and reduced the height of the header area above the main navigation to bring more content up above the fold.

    If you click through a few post pages you will see I’ve put quite a bit of work into getting decent related posts showing up with thumbnails, large images loading in shadowbox, etc. The bulk of the time developing has gone into tuning these aspects.

    Plugins I’m using are as follows:

    • Add LightBox & Title
    • Akismet
    • Google XML Sitemaps
    • HeadSpace2
    • Ravatar
    • Related Posts by Category
    • SexyBookmarks
    • Ultimate Google Analytics
    • W3 Total Cache
    • Where did they go from here
    • WordPress Database Backup
    • WordPress Popular Posts
    • wordTube
    • wordTube-FlowPlayer
    • WP-PageNavi

    I’d loved to hear what you think and I hope sharing the list of the tools used will help others (I have not taken the time po post links to all plugins but if you search you will find https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/).

    Kind regards,

    Lachlan

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