For their Projects, Personnel and Facilities pages, we needed a way to display images, information and links without being confined to the normal block of text. To accomplish this in a way that added to the design, made the information more readable and was still easy to edit from the backend, would not have been possible without the Flutter plugin, which allows you to create custom content types and then display those different content areas anywhere on the page.

The Home Page

The overall concept is meant to be a clean, modern design that would properly represent a professional production company.

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The Personnel Pages

The main focus of this site is to showcase the personnel and sound stages that are available to be packaged. The personnel are categorized by their positions from Post Production Supervisor to Composer to Sound Mixer and everything in between. Each person would need a quick bio, a headshot, a list of credits and an area to highlight some past projects. Each highlighted project would also need an image and a series of links.

Here is a look at one of the composers:

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The News Section

The standard blog abilities of WordPress were put to use in the News section where I was able to try out the new Post Image functions available in WordPress 2.9. In previous versions, giving each post a thumbnail required adding plugins and a decent amount of code. Now it is as easy as uploading an image and adding one simple line to the template files. The use of thumbnails really added a lot, especially to a basic clean design like this one.

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To view large scale images, I used the same plugin you see on my site as you view these images, the Shadowbox JS plugin. It automatically adds this effect to any image that links to itself in a post. Really easy to use and adds a lot to the final product.

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A Look At the Site

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A Look At the New Blog

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Details: Social Media Links

Details: Custom 404 Page

As I explained in the post about another site, the 404 error page is one of the most overlooked aspects of any site. A site should be able to handle when something goes wrong. If you have ever reached a site that said something like ‘The Page you are looking for can not be found,” you are looking at what is called a 404 error page. 404 refers to the numerical code thrown back to the browser by the server. Generally, these pages are ugly and not very helpful. The standard WordPress 404 will simply provide a serach box, if anything and will probably be a plain page. But wouldn’t it be more helpful to provide suggestions for what the visitor might be looking for?

It is possible to add an instant search result to these pages, using the url that the person was looking for. Rather than saying the site can not find that page, we have the site do a quick search and see if it finds anything close. This is great because a lot of these errors are just misspellings or typos. But the search will probably find it. Just in case the search fails, I also have it list the categories and archives links.

To see it in action try this link http://plumtreestudios.com/blog/ wedding photograph. You can see that there are blank spaces in the link and there is definitely no URL there. But instead of an error, the site offers several posts that relate to those locations.

Details: Custom 404 Page

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Details: Custom Site Options

Across the top of most blogs, you could display the title and description of the blog, have a single image as the header (possibly an image that includes a logo, or the title of the site), or you could do something fancy like a fading slideshow of images. Picking any one of these would mean being stuck with it unless you know how to edit code yourself or want to hire your web guy again for changes.

So I have started including an options area in all my sites where the user can select any of the three options at any time. Not only that, the fading slideshow I use reads any image you put in a folder. All you have to do is upload images to the folder to change your slideshow. If you ever get sick of the fading images, just change the option and upload a single image right in the WordPress admin area.

Details: Custom Site Options

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With an existing website and a strong brand and logo already in place, I simply had to adjust colors and fonts to match the existing site. For the background image, I had to create a new image using the background of the current site, filling in the middle portion where the website sits. There were also some custom programming tweaks to make the menu work the way we wanted, fix the layouts of the category pages, etc. Then I added the standard set of WordPress plugins to help with optimizing the site’s performance.

For better visibility in the search engines, I added the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. It allows you to customize the all important title tag for every page of your site. For the title tags, we used ‘Los Angeles Wedding Photographer, Indian Wedding Photographer’. The site currently ranks in Google at #5 for ‘Los Angeles Wedding Photographer’ and #4 for ‘Indian Wedding Photographer’.

Existing Portfolio Site

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New Matching Blog

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A while back, I had also done a custom splash page for the main site, with links to all of her sites and the blog.

A look at the Splash Page

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A look at the portfolio site

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A look at the Blog

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Details: Post Titles

There were lots of little details that added to the finished blog, a combination of design elements and custom programming to add some life to the site.

With a long list of posts in a blog-style layout, there is an opportunity to add imagery between the posts or surrounding the titles as a way to help separate one post from the next. I used a combination of things for Jules’ blog. Behind the title, I added a version of the swirl design and flowers that make up the background of the site.

To the left of each post is a set of icons that change depending on the category – cake for weddings, camera for photographer related posts, a house for portraits and a dog for dog portraits.

Details: Custom Images for Post Titles

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Details: Custom Comments on the Home Page

Usually comments are made on the permanent page for a single post. When you are looking at a long list of posts, you first have to click onto another page and wait for it to load before making a comment. But with a little bit of trickery, WordPress can list the comments for each post anywhere, including right under each post on the home page.

You can also have some fun with the text area where you type in the comments. Adding the three information boxes across the top helped save space and the little flower makes another appearance as the background of the textarea.

Details: Custom Comments

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Details: Custom Social Media Links and Welcome Area

One of the most important aspects of building a web presence is to connect all of the different parts to each other and make sure they are easy to find. Right across the top of the site, just under the fading slideshow header area, there is an area with a picture, the most recent Twitter status, easy to find links to Twitter and Facebook, a series of links to Jules’ other important sites, and a little link for her book, Olive Goes to Hollywood. Another interesting twist was to make the image of Jules randomly change on each page load. Try refreshing the site and the image will change every time.

Details: Connecting

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Details: Custom 404 Error Page

This is one of the most overlooked aspects of any site… What happens when something goes wrong? If you have ever reached a site that said something like ‘The Page you are looking for can not be found,” you are looking at what is called a 404 error page. 404 refers to the numerical code thrown back to the browser by the server. The technical aspect is one thing, but generally, these pages are ugly and not very helpful. The standard WordPress 404 will simply provide a serach box, if anything and will probably be a plain page. But wouldn’t it be more helpful to provide suggestions for what the visitor might be looking for?

It is possible to add an instant search result to these pages, using the url that the person was looking for. Rather than saying the site can not find that page, we have the site do a quick search and see if it finds anything close. This is great because a lot of these errors are just misspellings or typos. But the search will probably find it. Just in case the search fails, I also have it list the categories and archives links.

To see it in action try this link http://julesbianchi.com/blog/Four Seasons & Il Cielo . You can sse that there are blank spaces and an ampersand in the link and there is definitely no URL there. But instead of an error, the site offers several posts that relate to those locations.

You can see another example of this in my post about the custom blog for Plum Tree Studios.

Details: Custom 404 Page

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Post tags: clients, custom, custom web design, photography blog, web clients, web design, wedd, wedding photography blog, WordPress

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