I helped my chiropractor (who’s excellent, by the way!) set up a separate site for her acupucture practice. At first, we tried using the terrible Avada theme, which looks great but is jammed with so many competing features that its administration screens are a nightmare. We switched to the lovely Genesis framework, using the new Agency Pro child theme.
Because many people are nervous about needles, we put the frequently asked questions right up front. On the mobile version, the hours and location take priority.
FirstCall is the helpdesk site for the AgriLife division of the Texas A&M University System. I worked with the in-house team to rewrite the content, reorganize the home page and the site navigation, and design a WordPress theme that reflected the organization’s new, streamlined philosophy. We chose Glyphicons to give each helpdesk topic a little personality.
For this site, I used my own lightweight theme framework, Craftory.
Cassie had been using WordPress with free themes for some time when she sold her first novel. As its release date approached, she needed a “more grown-up” look. I took advantage of the striking cover art and worked a little magic so the text of Cassie’s blog posts wraps around the model’s silhouette — a common technique in print layouts, but one that’s seldom used on the web.
The design was refreshed in December 2013 with a new mobile layout.
After I finished TTI’s events site, the group asked me to make the main site’s theme responsive. I reworked the slider plugin, rearranged content for mobile, and rewrote hard-coded home page elements as widgets.
FAZD, a part of Texas A&M’s AgriLife division, is a research center focusing on animal disease. In addition to the usual news and informational pages, the site needed to showcase the Center’s research projects, tools (the finished results of past research projects, like diagnostic tests or software packages), and the people involved in them. These used to be listed by hand on standard WordPress pages, but the group wanted a more interconnected site, with links added between projects and people automatically.
The content model for this site is more complex than most, involving three custom post types — research projects, tools, people — each with a set of custom fields. People are connected to their research projects and tools via the Posts 2 Posts plugin.
There are several custom taxonomies shared across the post types, including topics, diseases, and institutions. Institutions partnering with FAZD on a research project are added to the project when a user tags them in the Edit Project screen.
The institutions taxonomy is also used for People, to indicate which one a person works for. An individual’s bio page shows their connected institutions as well as a list of the research projects they’re working on. The staff directory lists the people associated with FAZD using custom fields for the contact information.
The design is very closely based on the Genesis Education theme. It was so close to the ideal site described and sketched in our kickoff meeting that we used it almost as-is, aside from gutting the archive templates to handle the site’s complex post types and taxonomy system.
This group needed a site for their conference, and they needed it done in a hurry. They had a Photoshop comp from their designer, but it was a fixed width design, and they wanted a mobile-friendly site. I decided to make it responsive, and I worked with them to determine content priorities for mobile widths and rearrange the navigation menu for very small screens. We also worked quite a bit on the program schedule table to make sure all the information is accessible and clear on tablets and phones.
This was my first Genesis theme project, and I was quite pleased with the framework and the end result.
This project came along just a week or two after the Technology in Higher Education conference, and the situation was similar: a short deadline and a design in hand that wasn’t planned with responsive layouts in mind. Again, I used Genesis to get things going quickly.
The crew at PressBooks asked me to customize the standard WordPress importer to behave a little differently: instead of immediately publishing the stuff from the old blog, they wanted to put the imported content into a queue and let the user select where it should go: their book’s front matter, the main chapters, or the back matter (which PressBooks has set up as custom post types). The tricky part here was adding a new bulk action — custom bulk actions aren’t supported in WordPress!
