By the summer of 2008, Justine had been blogging in WordPress for some time, and wanted to use it to manage the 100 or so static pages that made up the rest of her site. She also wanted to update the look of the site and make it easier to maintain. The old design included individual banner images designed to match each book, which was lovely but meant that Justine couldn’t add the pages for a new book without the designer’s help. I designed a new theme, migrated all the old HTML files into WordPress pages, and wrote a handful of custom widgets.
This was, at the time, the largest WordPress site I had worked on. I learned a huge amount during the project. Looking back, this is where I got started as a plugin developer.
I hated the fact that half the hours I billed on the initial project were for copying and pasting the old Dreamweaver pages into WordPress. This task, along with some similar migration work I was doing in my day job at the Texas A&M System Offices, inspired the HTML Import plugin I wrote a year later.
In 2010, this site was featured in a gallery of the best book-related web designs. A refresh of the site launched in 2013.
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