Pushing the Limits

  • I wanted to share two sites that I’ve created recently which push the CMS and design capabilities of WordPress.

    The first is my site: http:/tddewey.com

    • It uses a slide down panel for instance access to recent tweets, facebook updates, as well as site content (photographs and design). I can set any particular post or page to be “featured” and it will show up in the center area of this drop down.
    • The photography page pulls in photography from Flickr and displays it at a large resolution.
    • The design portfolio uses WordPress pages to function. The main portfolio page (the grid of images) is a custom loop.
    • The other internal pages are also WordPress pages that have been highly styled
    • The entire site is connected up to Facebook, using WP Facebook Connect by Adam Hupp

    The second site (https://888artfest.com), which was built for a client, looks more like a typical WordPress site, but has some more discreet features:

    • Each of the tabs across the top ends up having it’s own color and header graphic which aids in navigation across the site
    • “Our Events” is a custom loop that pulls from specific posts marked as ArtFest events.
    • Similarly, “past ArtFest shows” goes to a template with a custom loop
    • Art Shows, Artists, Musicians, and Authors are all directories. The information is pulled from custom field data for each page then sorted into tables using javascript.
    • These tables can also be used to list and link the individual artists that are participating in a particular show

    I look forward to WordPress 3.0’s custom post type GUI — I can see having a post-type for “artist” or “author” and making all this work significantly easier!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Hey Taylor,

    That’s one very funky portfolio site you’ve created. Great work! I love the use of images through the site; really nice touch.

    I guess the only question is how well the site works for people without Javascript? If you’re likely to get clients who don’t have Javascript, that might be a problem… if not, then I probably wouldn’t worry about that.

    Eric

    Thread Starter Taylor Dewey

    (@taylorde)

    @ericdaams: I would imagine that people who turn javascript off are more power users and will know, to some extent, what they’re missing in terms of UX. On my site, you can still get around just fine, the biggest things missing are the labels on the navigation don’t show up so it’s somewhat of a guess as to what’s on the other side (if you’ve never visited before) and the preview panel is unable to roll up or down. It’s fixed in the “down” position on the front page (which is fine, there’s no valuable content behind it) and stuck “up” on interior pages.

    Thanks for checking it out!

    nice sites, well done indeed.

    Keep pushing those boundaries.

    tddewey.com is difficult to navigate the top buttons. If Im scanning left to right the word pops up for the item and covers the next one so i can’t hover to the next menu item.

    wow nice work..love to see wordpress out of its natural state

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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