Off The Kerb Productions online presence was suffering a little due to their website’s structure, poor urls and look and feel. So they decided that they wanted to refresh and recode their site to give users a better experience and make it more SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) friendly. To build the new website Chris Billett acted as the Project / Production Manager, Nick Carter did all the designs and I did all the backend and frontend coding to produce the new version of the website.
The build of this site was quite involved and to put it together I:
- Sliced up all the PSD (Photoshop design files) to construct the initial HTML / CSS templates
- Added jQuery / Javascript to the designs for animations and other visual effects
- Converted the HTML / CSS templates into a custom WordPress theme
- Made extensive use of WordPress custom post types and a custom field plugin to make it easy for Off The Kerb to manage all the different content types that make up the site
- Integrated the WordPress theme with Google Maps API version 3
- Added Facebook features
- Integrated the WordPress theme with a Newsletter mailing system
- Wrote a WordPress custom plugin with custom short codes and custom template tags to produce all the specified functionality such as custom content type searching and integrating a custom post type with Google Maps API
After weeks of work the site went live and immediately started to receive great feedback. Off The Kerb are extremely pleased with the new website look and feel, and delighted with the increase in traffic that it is experiencing as a result of redeveloping it. This was a great project to work on with Chris and Nick and I thoroughly enjoyed developing it.