The UniCab Taxi of Tomorrow is an idea whose time has come – Access For All, ShareAFare, EcoAware

This site had to be put together fast as the deadline approached, so a WooThemes template (Apz) was the way to go, choosing a frontpage with a slider for featured images to highlight the distinctive design features of the UniCab concept vehicle. A few minor tweaks later, and we had a website.

There is a section for news updates, and a Twitter account and Facebook page were part of the overall social media strategy. A key aspect was providing downloads for information packs for media and other interested parties – these have been immensely popular.

While appearing very simple this site has many sophisticated options under the skin, including capacity to easily extend the site with photo and video galleries or active news updates of Nisha’s professional activities.

As well as the extensive custom gallery options, Sheryl now has a blog function to write in more detail about her creative process.

I’ve rewritten nearly every file in the original GraphPaperPress Monochrome Lite template to provide a custom template for a client who needs extra CMS functionality built into each page of their multi-author site.

Obviously, the theme doesn’t have to be purple – it can easily be adapted to work on any colour palette by changing background, header graphics and link colours.

Major features: custom page templates to highlight different ways of listing content.

• authors’ list page
• individual author’s archive pages
• archives main page
• links page
• wide (no-sidebar) page

A full overhaul of the database plus implementation of various plugins to enhance site security and loading speed were necessary, plus a theme redesign to one that was fast to load and optimised for search engines, yet which kept the familiar look for the blog’s readers so that they were not overwhelmed by too many changes all at once.

The premium customising features of the Thesis theme framework were the key here. This allowed a rapid redesign of the blog, retaining the familiar colours and graphics while simplifying the presentation of information on the site.

Features:
• sliding panels on the front page to display teasers for more detailed content on other pages of the site
• links to downloadable high-resolution publicity photos and a downloadable zip-file of a media/promo kit
• gigs calendar run from a web-calendar application that can be accessed easily on the road or at an internet cafe

The template used is a customised version of a Woothemes template, adding a few graphic elements to soften a crisp template with a few elegantly playful touches.

This is another customisation of the highly flexible Thesis theme for WordPress, a template built with accessibility and SEO in mind.

This is a special-purpose site that needed to be up and running quickly in order to catch the current news cycle. Using a very lightly modified template from WooThemes, the site was live less than 24 hours after the relevant scandal broke.

The front page highlights the key message in one full width summary section and a special tab in the navigation is contrasted to draw attention to the call to action. Any campaign, commercial or community-based, benefits from having a strong, clear message on the front page with easy links to further information as one reads through the site.

The advantage of using a commercially available theme pretty much out-of-the-box is that it makes it possible to have a site up and running within hours. With more time available, such sites can be designed with unique campaign branding that highlights the call to action even more strongly.

Having been an avid blogger on health and wellbeing for many years, Gill also wanted to incorporate her existing blog posts as news articles on the new site. As they were archived at blogspot.com, this involved importing them and applying a new category and tag hierarchy for indexing and navigation purposes. A batch processing tool made this a simpler process than manually editing all those posts would have been. The site design also needed to have a strong separation between the professional services section and the blog articles section, achieved by the separation of certain types of content by coloured block backgrounds.

The end result is a highly individualised website for Gill, offering her a unique profile on the Web.

The number of plugins has been culled, preferring now to use Thesis hooks to call functions previously called by plugins, and the site’s layout is cleaner.

The Thesis multimedia box functions have been great fun, showing rotating images on most pages with occasional custom code inserts on specific pages, such as this one which displays random photos from the Hoydenizen community Flick group’s image pool.