Lumina Consulting Group wanted a complete rework of their corporate website, using only their logo as a starting point for visual branding. The old site was very content heavy and the client wanted to move the majority of the content to a library of “blog” articles, while keeping a lightweight framework of pages for their consulting services and company information.
Key Tools: WordPress, Thematic Theme Framework, Featured Content Gallery
Notes: While the project scope was a rework of the business’ existing site, the amount of content revisions essentially made it a new site. Most of the “heavy lifting” was related to stripping “blog” features out of the posts and presenting just the article texts in a “resource list” style. I was able to do all of it in the PHP functions file, so future updates to the site theme will not require constant maintenance.
This was the first project I’ve done with the Feature Content Gallery slider. Unlike the Image Menu slider on LearyGates.com, this one was relatively straightforward, especially since it’s available as a WordPress plugin. I did a little custom CSS work on the text overlays, but mostly it’s “out of the box”. Eventually I’d like to figure out a way to change the behavior such that clicking on the carousel images would go to the target pages instead of loading the full-size image in the slider.
The plugin list is pretty straightforward:
All in One SEO Pack
Auto Thickbox
Better Excerpt
Contact Form 7
Featured Content Gallery
Google Analytics for WordPress
List category posts
Section Widget
Simple Pull Quote
Simple Section Navigation Widget
Stray Random Quotes
Thumbnail for Excerpts
A handful of those are in anticipation of future content and not really being used presently. I also “wrote” a small plugin that is a modified version of Excerpts from Children – it reads custom fields defined on a page’s child pages to build a gallery of thumbnails, titles and excerpts that link to the respective child pages. I started by defining all of the custom fields separately, but eventually ended up just reusing the thumbnail and excerpt fields defined for Feature Content Gallery. The output is accessed via a shortcode and can be seen on the services and team pages.
The header nav bar treatment was inspired by the Early Morning theme, which evidently was inspired by a previous edition of Adrian Pelletier’s site. After I’d done the initial design, I discovered that my treatment was almost exactly the same as the Acamas theme offered for sale by Themeshaper. D’oh!
The Section Widget plugin came in very handy for building the unique page sidebars, with the advantage that my client can edit the content whenever he chooses rather than having it hardcoded in PHP fragments or a functions file. Having the category posts available by shortcode (List category posts) was *very* convenient.
Lumina Consulting Group
Key Tools: WordPress, Thematic Theme Framework, Featured Content Gallery
Notes: While the project scope was a rework of the business’ existing site, the amount of content revisions essentially made it a new site. Most of the “heavy lifting” was related to stripping “blog” features out of the posts and presenting just the article texts in a “resource list” style. I was able to do all of it in the PHP functions file, so future updates to the site theme will not require constant maintenance.
This was the first project I’ve done with the Feature Content Gallery slider. Unlike the Image Menu slider on LearyGates.com, this one was relatively straightforward, especially since it’s available as a WordPress plugin. I did a little custom CSS work on the text overlays, but mostly it’s “out of the box”. Eventually I’d like to figure out a way to change the behavior such that clicking on the carousel images would go to the target pages instead of loading the full-size image in the slider.
The plugin list is pretty straightforward:
A handful of those are in anticipation of future content and not really being used presently. I also “wrote” a small plugin that is a modified version of Excerpts from Children – it reads custom fields defined on a page’s child pages to build a gallery of thumbnails, titles and excerpts that link to the respective child pages. I started by defining all of the custom fields separately, but eventually ended up just reusing the thumbnail and excerpt fields defined for Feature Content Gallery. The output is accessed via a shortcode and can be seen on the services and team pages.
The header nav bar treatment was inspired by the Early Morning theme, which evidently was inspired by a previous edition of Adrian Pelletier’s site. After I’d done the initial design, I discovered that my treatment was almost exactly the same as the Acamas theme offered for sale by Themeshaper. D’oh!
The Section Widget plugin came in very handy for building the unique page sidebars, with the advantage that my client can edit the content whenever he chooses rather than having it hardcoded in PHP fragments or a functions file. Having the category posts available by shortcode (List category posts) was *very* convenient.