Loading ...Seapedilizia.it - A website for my father’s business
Posted by in Hardware & Software. Tags: web, wordpress.
My father asked me wheter I had time for creating a website for his business for months, if not years. Now that I finished my exams and I’m working on my thesis, I finally resolved to begin write it.
I did’t make a fresh start: during last summer I started writing a new theme for my website (it is very simular, if not the same, to the one you’re seeing here), and as i liked it a lot, i decided to begin from it.
However, even if i started writing also the website engine (i.e. the php-based set of scripts that enable you to administrate it easily), that was yet in a premature stage. So, i considered to drop CcEngine development (that would have required a lot of time) in favor of another engine.
The Wordpress choice
The first, obvious choice was Wordpress: not only if is open-source, GLP licensed, but it is also widely, righly appreciated and - now i can state for sure - has a great plugin-powered structure that makes it infinitely extensible, much the same as Firefox.
Even if Wordpress was designed to be a blog engine, it can be adjusted to fit anyone’s needs. It is a matter of writing you own theme and detecting and installing the extensions you need. There is almost no need to know php (but it is required to make some insight customization). However, there’s a good, complete documentation, and if you’re already experienced with php you’ll find no difficulty.
The markup language’s choice
The first thing i did was designing a theme, based on the one i wrote for the new cicoandcico.com. Unfortunately, it was still in html, while Wordpress’s styles are not. They are based on XHTML + CSS. The porting required some effort, but hey man, believe me when i say that it was worth it.
I suggest everyone to switch from HTML to XHTML+CSS
Indeed, there are enormous advantages. First of all, that approach follows the “separe style from content” rule. That means flexibility and portability (think to handheld devices).
Seapedilizia.com with css either enabled or disabled. Try yourself with Firefox Webdeveloper extension!
Secondly, once the style has been written, it is really a matter of seconds to change, for instance, colors: you just operate on the style sheet, et voilà (sorry for the french, i really hate this language but it’s so sexy sometimes).
In addition, pages are usually lighter, and generally the code you write has a higher probability to display the same way in different browsers (read: Internet Explorer is a shit but i’m forced to test my websites with it, too).
If you still have doubts, here are “55 reasons to design in XHTML/CSS“.
The theme
After some readings about usability studies, I decided to go for a semi-liquid layout with a left sidebar. Semi-liquid means that the width of the sidebar and the content changes with resolution, but there are lower and upper limits (800×600 and 1280×800). I found this solution to be optimal for most users. You can obtain that with whis code:
min-width:754px;
max-width:1152px;
/*Internet explorer 6 */
width:expression(document.body.clientWidth < 838? "754px" : document.body.clientWidth > 1280? “1152px” : “90%” );
Yes, the right way is using css min-width and max-width properties but - strangely - Internet explorer does not support them. That’s the reason of the last line.
As the site has a limited number of pages, I chose to go for pages instead of posts. Posts are more blog-oriented, in the sense that they have a comment area, a navigator and so on. The first area of the sidebar shows the page list, then there are contact informations with a link to an email form.
Extending WP with plugins
Some great plugin I’m using:
- NextGen Gallery to manage image galleries
- Adsense-manager to - guess what? - manage google ads trough all pages and sidebar
- WP-DownloadManager to manage downloads and show a proper page
- RUNPhp to run php code in WP pages or sidebar
- GZ-Datestyle to display the nice calendar near the post’s title
- DD-FormMailer to get a contact form
Some of these plugins needed a little tweaking to work properly with WP 2.3, others were tweaked just to fit my needs (i’m quite hard to please).
We’ll see
The site has been added to the major search engines. I hope that it will be useful. It does not have a great importance for such a business, as people obviously prefer to have a personal, direct approach. The site is more like a showcase than a selling point, and as a showcase it just have to give some major details and have a - how can i say? - a pretty appearance.
SeapEdilizia.it: do you like it?