TayloredWeddings.com
Recently I finished up a lengthy design project for Mitch Taylor, owner of Taylored Weddings in Michigan. One of the great thing about this web design project was working with Mitch over the course of several months to develop a visually pleasing concept that is both user friendly as well as highly effective at converting site traffic into sales. After many hours of consultations and several abortive concepts, we finally landed in that sweet spot where creativity and inspiration come together with amazing results. Mitch found a WordPress template that he liked and it was up to me to hack it to his specifications.
Another greath thing about this project was implementing the ideas that Mitch had, which required coming up with some creative solutions that were not inside my toolbox of regular tricks. For instance, one of the hurdles that we ran into was that of getting Flash animation to work properly with all of the other scripts that are used. Also, because of the number of scripts used in the design, occasionally we ran into problems with the scripts themselves playing nice with each other. Again this required thinking outside the box and coming up with several ingenius methods of creating the desired effects while not crashing the rest of the site or rendering other effects inoperable.
One such example would be that of the Flash slide show in the header of the main page. The usual methods of embedding Flash into a website did not work because of the way that WordPress renders dynamic page URLs. While there was no issue using the default method of creating page and post URLs, the SEO friendly method of rendering URLs left something to be desired using the traditional methods of embedding Flash into a web page. After some experimentation over the course of a week, the best method seemed to be editing the PHP code of the WordPress template as well as some minor adjustments to the associated JScript. The end result is the nice addition of a Flash animation that also uses XML to match much of the slide show content with the wording, controlling effects and so on.
Another area that had us stumped for some time was that of the rotating testimonials that appear just to the right of the “ACCOLADES:” heading. Mitch wanted some form of animation that rotated through several glowing client testimonials that were also linked to corresponding posts within his blog. I tried using the previous script that I developed to do just that, but it interfered with the other instances of animation that make heavy use of Scriptaculous in WordPress. It left me scratching my head many times as I would go on to finish other aspects of the project after each abortive attempt to get the links/testimonials rotators to work with everything else.
The solution finially came to me late one night and I was so enthusiastic that I had to call Mitch to tell him about it! After I reassured him that I was a genius several times, I went on to explain the rather simplistic solution that solved the entire problem. Once that hurdle was cleared, the rest of the project was a cakewalk!
You may visit Mitch’s new site at: TayloredWeddings.com
Tags: customized template, flash animation, grahpic design, mitch taylor, scripting, taylored weddings, template, web design, web master, web project development, webmaster, wordpress
