Roweena web design

School website migrated from old CMS to WordPress, hurrah!

roweenaweb — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:33:43 +0000

I’ve been working with Windlesham School as their website support for a couple of years. The website was originally built in a rather awkward content management system that didn’t allow website editors to carry out simple tasks such as changes photos easily or categorising news and events. We decided to bite the bullet and move the website out of the clunky old system into WordPress. I built a new WordPress theme based on the existing website design and the school moved the content across and uploaded their lovely new photos. You can see what you think here: www.windleshamschool.co.uk

Using the WordPress Mobble plugin to tweak responsive websites

roweenaweb — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 21:25:06 +0000

I just want to give a shout out to the Mobble plugin, as it’s made things easier in the development of a few responsive websites I’ve worked on recently. The plugin detects which device is viewing the website, handheld, mobile, tablet and at a more granular level iPad, iPhone, Blackberry etc. Whilst it would be great if a fluid grid with a smattering of media queries produced the perfect responsive website, in practice sometimes you want to be able to tweak things a little more.

I’ve used the plugin for instances where things can’t or shouldn’t bet hidden by CSS, for example:

Detecting if the device is a mobile, if so set the viewport. For one website I worked on we decided that actually it worked better on the ipad/tablet if viewport wasn’t set.
Detecting if the device is a desktop, if so serve the all bells and whistles flash video player (client request), if mobile, use a simple YouTube embed.
Set different values for a jQuery Gallery plugin, depending on whether mobile, tablet or desktop is viewing the page.

The plugin uses WordPress conditional functions and at a simple level can be used to skip processing certain content, for example superfluous sidebar, large images and so on.

Simplify the WordPress interface with CMS plugins

roweenaweb — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 08:15:04 +0000

Whilst WordPress is really easy to use, there are a couple of CMS WordPress plugins I install, depending on the project, to help make the editing interface more friendly.

CMS Tree Page View is useful for websites with more than a handful of pages. It presents a hierarchical tree of pages in the dashboard, pages can be opened for editing and reordered by drag and drop. This makes managing pages much quicker than accessing them by the pages menu option.

White Label CMS has lots of useful bits and bobs to help make WordPress look more like a CMS but what I really like it for is turning off: menu items that aren’t used, the “update” message that appears at the top of the screen, page/post meta boxes and the screen options pull down menu.

With any CMS, the goal should be to make editing as simple and intuitive as possible, WordPress is almost there, these two plugins just provide the extra options to help.

Website for Nutritional Therapist Nicola Moore

roweenaweb — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:07:08 +0000

I’ve just launched a new website for Nutritional Therapist Nicola Moore. I usually build custom WordPress themes but this project had a limited budget so we decided on using the Twenty Eleven theme that comes bundled with WordPress. With a few changes to the default colours, addition of some stock photos and a logo created using a free handwritten font, the website has it’s own unique look.

My new look website – smarter and mobile friendly

roweenaweb — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:49:38 +0000

I just finished my new look website this morning. It’s good for any business to have a look at their website every couple of years , realign the design and content with what they’re currently doing and take advantage of progress in web development techniques. So this is what I did:

made my logo stronger
made the overall design cleaner
edited the content and focused it on what I do, aiming it at the clients I want to be working with.
simplified the blog
made it work on mobile devices

I use the Zurb Foundation framework to get it up and running quickly. I usually dislike using frameworks but I find Zurb makes sense so I’ll be using it again, thank you Zurb!

Any comments on the new design appreciated!