IronWorksMen.com is the website of IronWorks Ministry, a men’s group ministry by our church (and others). I was asked to redo their site, keeping their logo intact, but refreshing the content and visual look-and-feel.
Notes: The previous IronWorks site had been based on a design whose visual elements played off of Proverbs 27.17: ” as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” Keeping that design was not a requirement, so I explored an approach that picks up the metallic textures in the ministry’s logo.
This was an interesting project as I was trying very hard to make the content accessibility as user-friendly as possible from an admin perspective. Nothing could be hard-coded into the functions file or page templates. It either needed to be contained in a post or in a widget. As such, Section Widget came in very handy for defining page-specific content.
For the home page, I am pulling the most recent post from a specific category to populate the main area, then using widgets for the remainder of the content. I’ve restructured the primary main aside to fit horizontally beneath the feature area and have populated Thematic’s subsidiary widget areas as well.
The Archives page was a bit of a challenge. I am showing excerpts from a specific category as the main archive entries, then using a category list plugin to list what are essentially individual child posts.
Those individual posts are media heavy, with embedded video and audio links. The client is using Vimeo as their video hosting platform — the Vimeo for WordPress plugin shows all of their video titles in WordPress, allowing them to pick which title to embed on a particular post. The WPaudio plugin converts .mp3 links into an inline audio player.
RefTagger converts scripture references into a pop-up window with the appropriate Biblical text.
Another new plugin was Simple Post Template. Since the client is only using posts as a way to archive presentation materials, I designed a simple tabular layout with text labels that will open by default whenever they create a new post. The client simply needs to update the descriptive text and make sure the right media links are being used.
IronWorks
Notes: The previous IronWorks site had been based on a design whose visual elements played off of Proverbs 27.17: ” as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” Keeping that design was not a requirement, so I explored an approach that picks up the metallic textures in the ministry’s logo.
This was an interesting project as I was trying very hard to make the content accessibility as user-friendly as possible from an admin perspective. Nothing could be hard-coded into the functions file or page templates. It either needed to be contained in a post or in a widget. As such, Section Widget came in very handy for defining page-specific content.
For the home page, I am pulling the most recent post from a specific category to populate the main area, then using widgets for the remainder of the content. I’ve restructured the primary main aside to fit horizontally beneath the feature area and have populated Thematic’s subsidiary widget areas as well.
The Archives page was a bit of a challenge. I am showing excerpts from a specific category as the main archive entries, then using a category list plugin to list what are essentially individual child posts.
Those individual posts are media heavy, with embedded video and audio links. The client is using Vimeo as their video hosting platform — the Vimeo for WordPress plugin shows all of their video titles in WordPress, allowing them to pick which title to embed on a particular post. The WPaudio plugin converts .mp3 links into an inline audio player.
RefTagger converts scripture references into a pop-up window with the appropriate Biblical text.
Another new plugin was Simple Post Template. Since the client is only using posts as a way to archive presentation materials, I designed a simple tabular layout with text labels that will open by default whenever they create a new post. The client simply needs to update the descriptive text and make sure the right media links are being used.