Web Design Company, Hampshire UK

The last couple of weeks have involved the rush towards finishing Antheaturner.com. This has involved me working longer hours and weekends, though, as I am quickly learning, this is a common factor when approaching the handover of large web projects. In order to achieve the client’s wishes, it has meant working very closely with ICOM, a digital marketing agency based on Regent Street. They phone regularly to provide ongoing feedback which has resulted in a decrease in the time lost due to inaccuracies in design and development.

My task this week was to complete the ‘Lifestyle’ and ‘Blog’ section of the site. The Lifestyle section is a mixture of recipes and tips. All in all this has meant creating about 40 pages with individual styling aspects on many of pages, an issue which results in a lot of time being spent trying to make sure that the CSS of the site didn’t conflict.

This brings me on to my tip of the week

I have used a Joomla CMS system in combination with YOO ZOOto create Anthea’s site. So many of my pages show teasers of articles.. e.g a recipe name with a short description.. You then click on the teaser and are taken to the full recipe. I had an an issue where the teaser was also displaying on the full article view and no apparent way of stopping this.

I had a chat with a colleague of mine and stumbled upon this extension which saved the day.

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/modules-management/10307

It allows you further control of modules, so you can see which appear on a page saving time when searching for modules with similar names. Also, I was able to use a joomla article on the teaser page which enabled me to isolate the teaser images to the specific article in question.

I wish I had know about this sooner!

The guv’nor has decided that our website would be better served being based on wordpress than it’s current Joomla installation. This has meant searching through the vast number of designers that we wished to work with. We finally settled on a design which we feel really brings something new to our site.

The sheer volume of designs available for wordpress means that you are blessed as a developer. In other words, you pay a very small amount of money for a fantastic design that incorperates functionality with beauty.

When changing your template with WordPress it is very important that you are flexible with your approach. Each design and therefore template has it’s own ways of accessing the full potential. Usually there will be examples of just what the template can do that are included as pages within the navigation. If not just checkout the demo.

Here is the new site

You can see how we have used the the built-in functionality to make the site stand out. Take a look at the ‘Latest from our Blog’ section at the bottom of the ‘home page’. The simple combination of content with margins and an image, makes the site look professional and different.

On this page here

This is a page I am not so happy with.

Oh dear!

We had an idea to include vector portraits of ourselves as it seems to be the ‘in’ thing. Sadly I have ended up looking like I am made of rubber. Not so good.