Blog // The website has landed
26
Feb
Phase one of Quirksmode is finally complete! It’s been quite a journey. I always find that the hardest work you undertake as a designer is when it’s for yourself. Why it is so hard I am not 100% sure because there are no strict deadlines or sudden changes to keep you on your toes.
Perhaps it’s the simple fact that you will never be happy with the end result and this is why I have decided to name this first release “Phase one”, with lots more improvements and features to soon follow. This website is a custom built Wordpress theme, which also operates as my content management system. My initial plans were to create a static portfolio, but after spending some time experimenting with Wordpress, I realised that with some heavy tweaking it could more than suit my CMS needs. It’s a real mix of different technologies, which I hope have blended together successfully. The flash banner at the top is just a holding image at the moment, but I have some big plans for something special to go there soon. I really got to grips with Jquery over the last year or so and it has proven to be so useful for adding a little extra spice to an otherwise static page. The portfolio section features this the most; including two rather useful plugins for the image slider and lightbox.
Great care was taken to ensure this website is accessible and all code fully standards compliant. SEO seems to be pretty tight and have started to get some good page rankings for my primary keywords. I use a great SEO plugin by uberdose which has proven very useful so many thanks to him for that. A full list of all the different plugins I have used for this website can be found here. I find that these are the key to transforming Wordpress into a fully functioning CMS and I really hope that we will start to see them being incorporated into later releases as standard.
Overall I am really happy with how it has all turned out. As I have already mentioned, building your own website will often prove to be the hardest, but once it’s finally online it is definitely all worth it. Please let me know your thoughts on this website, I am really open to comments/suggestions and will endeavor to get back to anyone that takes time to get in touch.
David Plunkett
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