The first website I am working on since WordPress 2.7 came out is a pet sitter in my local area. We meet the good people at Critter Care when we had a trip and really could not bring our baby along:
So one day when Critter Care Kim and I were talking she asked what I really do. At that moment I was working on some websites for some businesses and her reply was basically “oh, I want to get one.”
Over the next little while, we meet a few times to explain our approach, where most people think of websites as either the visuals or the program that makes it all run, the content is the most important part. Yes, the visuals/them/etc must be above a specific bar, or it detracts from the content, but you don’t go to a website for the visuals. At the same time, the program just has to work, at least to the end user. The people who manage and maintain the content or website are the people who care about the ease of use of the program.
Next we looked at what type of data or content they would be producing & what the customers and potential customers would be looking for. After that, figuring out what content would be produced, it was a question of “how do we best present this data?” and “what all should be on the main page?”
With that information and mindset we went looking for a great base theme to use. AllThingsOnDemand has loved the work of Brian Gardner & Revolution2 and we settled on the Revolution2 Office theme as the base, they have a demo.
From that, a mock-up was made; kinda like a blueprint. Then, the next phase of work begins that has been to build the site based on three things:
- Revolution2 Office base
- WordPress 2.7
- the core data from the client
Now some pictures; left is the mock-up, what we are aiming for, right is where I ended last night. I expect to be done today or tomorrow, or at least relay for the clients comments and data to be entered.
The sad thing is at this point all the work that needs to be done will be mostly unseen, but make the areas more dynamic, thus work. At this point the main page is mostly static.
Once this site is done either more clients will be ready to begin or we will focus on either this site or AllThingsOnDemand.
