Wicked PR» Web Development News on The Wicked Blog

KristanCunningham.com – Website Design and Development

Colin Cooley — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:36:55 +0000

Wicked was tasked with developing and executing an online branding and communications strategy for TV personality and one of America’s leading DIY design experts Kristan Cunningham, including designing and developing a website that brings to life Kristan’s unique identity and personality while also serving as the communication hub for all her projects. Wicked also designed a social media plan that extended Kristan’s reach and influence with her audience.

More than just a personality site, KristanCunningham.com was designed to be a daily resource for interior design and home decorating enthusiasts. The site offers stories, videos and photos that educate visitors on how to turn any decorating dilemma into an achievable reality.

Highlighted sections:

:: Do It Lovelier – Simple ideas to elevate your lifestyle. Do what’s practical. Do what’s affordable, just do it lovelier.

:: Adorable & Affordable – You don’t have to spend a million bucks to make your home look like it.

:: Resource Library - Let Kristan Cunningham help you find the right items for every room in your house.

:: Design Report - Kristan spotlights the newest products in the marketplace with links to where you can buy and for how much.

:: Flea Market Finds – Kristan shares the amazing treasures that she finds — and you can find– at flea markets, thrift stores and garage sales.

:: Favorite Things – Items they simply can’t live without – at least right now.

:: Auction Alert – Kristan finds treasures everyday online that won’t break your bank at sites like ebay and shopgoodwill.com and passes along those finds to you.

:: The Man Room and Floyd & Beans – Not just for women, the new site makes room for Kristan’s fiance Scott who shares his recommendations on everything from razors to shoes. And even their two dogs, Floyd and Bean, get in on the action with a section dedicated to items every dog — and dog owner — should own.

Finally, KristanCunningham.com gives fans of Kristan a glimpse of her life and travels, from how she spends her time when she’s home in Venice Beach to her adventures across America on design projects and in search of great products, music and food.

Wicked PR Launches New Website for Poker Player Justin Bonomo

Charles Simmons — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:57:52 +0000

Wicked designed and developed a new website for professional poker player Justin Bonomo at JustinBonomo.com. Justin and his management team were looking to completely revamp their existing site in order to better reflect who Justin is as person and poker player. Everything from video blogs, interviews, press releases, blog posts, photos, podcasts, Twitter and even musical tastes needed to be incorporated into the build.

On top of that, we always keep an eye on making the content management as simple as possible so the client is not required to contact us to keep their site up to date. From posting photos and videos to blog posts, it needed to be done in a way that was not time-consuming and made maintaining the site easier instead of frustrating. To that end, we used WordPress as the CMS and managed to find simple, yet elegant, solutions for this multimedia website.

Here are some notes on key parts of the site and how we implemented some of the features you will see at JustinBonomo.com.

HOME

Through several meetings, mock-ups and wireframes, we arrived at a design that that Justin felt suited his personality, then went about adding in content that would give visitors a quick glimpse into his life and career. To accomplish this, we included several elements that would serve as a dashboard for his most recent news items including most recent tweet, video interview and blog posts. To give visitors a glimpse at Justin’s personality, we included the Last.fm widget, which is updated with tracks he listens to on iTunes. As a result, the home page was no longer static like before and is now updated dynamically as he goes about his life and job.

GALLERY

Poker media outlets generate an immense amount of content on a daily basis and as one of the top players on the poker circuit, Justin is often featured in various photos and videos on those sites. We wanted the gallery to be a home for as much of that content as possible, pulling in multimedia from all over the web.

The photo gallery is managed by the excellent NextGen Gallery plugin, which gave us a lot of options for hosting our own images (boosting traffic for image searches) and displaying them gracefully using javascript. The backend of the plugin is very user-friendly and makes it easy to add individual photos and organize them into albums and galleries. The smaller selection on the main gallery page was populated by calling in a single sidebar containing the NextGen widget set to display random photos from the gallery. The full Photo Gallery page displays the entirety of that gallery we created within the plugin.

For videos, we ran into the problem of having content from varied sources needing to be integrated into the page in a manner easy enough for the user to update and universal enough to handle embed codes from multiple sites. Because of this, we couldn’t use a plugin without getting too complex and possibly eliminating some sites with non-standard embed codes. So, we made each video a separate post and used custom fields within those posts that would be pulled into the WordPress loop and displayed within a shadowbox set at a standard size to accomodate the largest video size likely to be used. For the user, adding videos to the site is as easy as writing a new blog post and pasting the video embed code into a custom field, the rest is handled by the template we created for the page. The full Video Gallery page is just an extension of this with the query set to show all posts from the category.

MEDIA

With the amount of written content put out, not only by poker media, but by Justin himself, we wanted to create a page that could be a hub for all of his media content – a dashboard of all things Justin. Clockwise, the media page displays his most recent articles written for print publications, articles from publications written about him, the latest news (press releases) from his management team, most recent blog posts, radio shows and podcasts and a Twitter feed. Some link directly out to the sites where he was featured and some link through to internal pages. Either way, the process of adding content to this dashboard is as easy for the user as creating a new blog post, putting it in the right (and obviously named) category and filling in some information in the (once again, obviously named) custom fields of the post. All of the links, titles and everything else are handled by the template built for the page.

BLOG

The most popular section of Justin’s old site was his blog, which featured poker strategy, tournament updates, personal updates and more. However, with no permalinks available for each post and no way for people to share the blog posts – without copying and pasting it somewhere else – his content was more or less stuck on his site. With this blog section (and thanks to WordPress, which makes this very easy) each post has its own link and one-click share tools, giving visitors the ability to tweet, Facebook, Digg, email or bookmark the posts instantly, spreading them across the social web and building Justin’s visibility as a brand while driving traffic and authority to his site.

Well, without getting too horribly technical, that’s about it. The site is up and already drawing in a good amount of traffic. Once the spiders realize that there is now lots more delicious content to devour, we’ll begin to see even more organic traffic heading in. The dynamic nature of the features we set up ensure that no visit is the same as long as the content is kept fresh, which has been made as easy as possible for the user. So, take a look at the site and let us know your thoughts in the comments below, reply to us on Twitter, or drop us a line on our Facebook page.

Top WordPress 2.9 Features For Clients and Developers

Charles Simmons — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:56:59 +0000

If you’re like us and into building socially competent websites that enable clients to make use of the social web to promote their brand, then you have probably worked with or, at least, thought about working with WordPress. And if you’re even more like us, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make it as simple as possible for the client to keep their website content current. Creating a site that the client has to keep coming back to get updated is just, well, inefficient and frustrating for them.

To that end, WordPress 2.9 has hit the shelves and comes packed with several features that make things easier for the client to manage and therefore easier for us to develop. Here are some brief descriptions on the improvements I like the most with links to more in-depth articles where needed…

Images:

1. Native Post Thumbnails – Everyone loves magazine-style thumbnails on their front page or blog/archive pages. Prior to 2.9, using them involved explaining to the client how to upload a picture through the normal method, click the radio button for the thumbnail version of the image, copy the image location URL, scroll down, select the correct Custom Field from the drop-down list and paste in that URL. Now, WordPress 2.9 comes with an optional feature that you can turn on in your themes to make thumbnail selection much easier to explain and to use.

Using The New Post Thumbnail Feature In WordPress 2.9

2. Image Editing – Making image management just that much easier, there are now crop, rotate, flip, scale and aspect ratio options available all from within the new “Edit Image” screen, which can be reached by clicking “Edit Image” once a picture has been uploaded.

WordPress 2.9 Media Manager and WP Image Editor Preview

Videos:

3. oEmbed Support – Embedding video has never been super difficult in WordPress, but sometimes having to switch between the HTML and Visual tabs adds a layer of confusion for the client to what can be an already confusing process depending on the complexity of their theme. With oEmbed protocol support, WordPress now takes the URL of a video and fetches the necessary embed code and displays the video correctly on the page. All the user has to do is put the URL on its own line. There are ways in which parameters can be added by using the shortcode, but for dead simple video embedding it’s just as easy as pasting in a URL.

WordPress Codex: Embeds

Editing:

4. Undo and Trash – These are both fairly self-explanatory. Undo gives users the option to, you know, undo things in the WordPress dashboard, like accidentally deleting a comment or approving a spam comment. Trash is now a kind of purgatory for posts, pages and comments. There is a new tab across the top of the edit screens and these three types of content can be moved to trash and then either restored, if you change your mind, or deleted permanently, if you never want to see that content ever again.

How to use Trash feature in WordPress 2.9 Version

SEO:

5. rel=canonical – The use of Canonical URLs is now native in WordPress 2.9 for singular pages. So, no need for plugins or template tweaking. Whenever you publish a post or page, it will automatically generate the rel=canonical meta tag in the header of the page.

Explanation as to what Canonical URLs actually are:

Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify Your Canonical

Users:

6. User Contact Fields: – WordPress user registration fields have always been rather limited and an odd collection of information. To get around this, I’ve always used the excellent Register Plus plugin to create additional fields and for extra tweaks with the login/register process. In WordPress 2.9, with a couple of additional lines in functions.php, you can now create/remove user fields as part of the core login process, without a plugin. Makes the whole thing just a little more stable to deal with.

User Contact Fields in WordPress 2.9

Templates:

7. Slug-Based Templates – From a development perspective, this is one of my favorite tweaks as it makes a life a little easier for me and not just for the client. Prior to this, category-specific templates could be created using the ID number of the category (category-.php), which made it a pain to go in and edit these templates. Who remembers the ID number of every category in every WordPress install? So, I would just toss everything into archive.php and use a collection of if/else statements to style category pages. Now, however, with the ability to use slugs (category-.php), finding and editing templates is much easier. If I want to create a category archive styled a specific way to display videos, all I have to do is create the template category-video.php and I can find it again easily for tweaks, and the WordPress template hierarchy takes it from there.

That’s it for now. There’s are a whole lot more WordPress 2.9 features and enhancements that have been included in this release and as I come across them and decide how useful they are to me, I’ll share them here.