The last few months have been really hectic for me as I posted here before with a few setbacks but I’m glad to say I’ve bounced back and things have returned to normal. I’ve completed a few nice little WordPress design projects all with their own interesting twists to them. I’m always amazed at just how many really great WordPress plugins exist to fill in the extra functionality needed.
www.strictlyhalaal.com
The first of them, a site which hasn’t launched yet but is pretty much completed is www.strictlyhalaal.com, which serves as a listing/directory site for “halaal” certified businesses.
Strictlyhalaal.com uses a few great free plugins:
- GD Star Rating allows for users to give each listing a rating.
- Collapsing Categories Plugin created that cool expandable category list on the homepage
- Ad Minister allows you to created widgetized ad spaces to add dynamic ads or content
Next up is Learningcurve.co.za
Learning Curve is a dedicated education technology supplier, representing premium brands such as Adobe, Apple, Dell, Autodesk and Toonboom. This was the first time I have setup an e-commerce website using WordPress and proved to be quite a challenge to begin with but also turned out to be a really valuable learning experience, no pun intended.
To power the e-commerce side fo things I used the wp-ecommerce plugin, which is a really powerful yet free plugin system allowing you to turn your WordPress site into an online store in a few clicks. Customizing the online store’s appearance was a bit of a mission for starters but it’s worth learning the ins & outs of this plugin, developed by the boys at www.instinct.co.nz.
I can’t unfortunately divulge the sales figures for the first 2 months, but lets just say I was more than pleasantly surprised. It’s great to see your work directly benefiting your client’s bottom line, especially immediately after it’s implementation.
Last but not least is Duomarketing.co.za
This is the first time I make use of a Woo Theme to develop a client site. I’m very impressed with what the guys at WooThemes are up to, and even more so when I took a little lookie under the hood of one of their themes. The theme options part is really well done, some of the code still boggles my mind a bit, but it allows the user to easily switch stylesheets for a change of colour and style.
The widgetized areas on the homepage works out quite well also allowing you to add pages into certain block of the homepage layout. The cost of the premium theme definitely adds value to the mix as it allows the client to aquire some really great features for a fraction of the cost of cutom development.