#wordpress customizations

So, I made a WordPress theme.  Hopefully I will be able to get it onto the WordPress repository soon.  It is a theme specifically for people who need to show off a visual portfolio, such as photographers and designers.  It would do well with industrial designers, as well.

I built it from the ground up to use every last inch of the available screen space.  I have a 27″ monitor, and it renders beautifully on there.  Of course, it formats on mobile quite well, too.

Independent Sidebar

One of my favorite features is the independent-scrolling sidebar.  The content in the sidebar will scroll at a slower (or faster) pace than the rest of the window, so that both the sidebar and the page end at the exact same time.  This gets rid of that awkward white space between the post content and the end of the document when your blog post is more than 500 words.

Single Post

An individual post displays a prominent header, featuring a huge featured image at the top.  The content has plenty of white-space on either side, which I think breaks the otherwise busy theme up.  When the content is longer, it reads a lot like an eBook, and that makes me very happy.  At the bottom, related articles are displayed based on the category of the post you’re reading.  All of the “Blog post boxes” you see are smart, and will fill the space appropriately if there is an odd number of posts.

Sidebar menu

The menu displays on a sidebar, and will darken the rest of the site when you click on it.  This helps put focus on the menu when it is clicked on.  A company logo can go above the menu, and a google-friendly, structured data address below the menu.

Image Gallery

All Wordpress image galleries will look like this.  I made a point to not use any special code on the user’s end, because I didn’t want to force users to go through all of their existing content to swap out for a new “fancy image gallery”

Mobile

Portrait

Landscape

About This Client

The National Center for Electronics Recycling (NCER) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization formed in 2005 that is dedicated to the development and enhancement of a national infrastructure for the recycling of used electronics in the U.S. They use their website to notify people about upcoming conferences and updates to electronics recycling law.

This Client's problem

NCER had an older non-mobile friendly website with few customization options. They needed a scale-able web platform to publish updates and customize long-term.

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Solution

Evaluate & Research

I looked at their original website, and evaluated how all of the information could be migrated to a Content Managed System in a more scale-able way. I noticed that a lot of their pages could be written as blog post topics and determined that WordPress would be a good option for their new site. NCER came to me with an HTML template that they liked, so I had plenty of design direction to go on.

Custom WordPress themeDesign and Layout

we determined that a custom WordPress theme would be a good fit. Changing the layout of their website was important to them, so all of the text on their site can be changed without writing any code. Most of my WordPress customization was building a theme that looked like the template they wanted, and organizing the menu in a way that would allow them to add content to the site easily. I made it a priority to not do anything outside of the core WordPress functionality in the theme, so that if they ever change to a new theme in the future their website content and structure will stay intact.

Training and Launch

After the custom WordPress theme was complete, I hosted an hour-long training session with the NCER, showing them how to use WordPress, as well as how to customize all of the elements of the website. It was a lot of information, so I sent them the session’s recording so they could refer to it at a later time. The resulting website is a modern, mobile friendly, WordPress-based website that will easily scale with their additional websites in the future. If they ever decide to change to a different WordPress theme, their site will still function properly because I stuck to core WordPress functionality, and taught them how to use that functionality with a training session.

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