Last year Carrie Stack of the Say Yes Institute and a certified Life Coach, asked me about helping her to launch a s site for her new project entitled EO. EO stands for Emotional Orgasm which is a term she and her business partner Michele Lazcano came up with to describe a moment when you connect with another person and the both of you realize that the connection has moved both of you forward to living your life fully.
I have to say I had a few EO’s of my own with this project. In collaborating with Katharine Navins of Tallow Studio for the visual aspects of the site, I came to realize that the “splash page”, long considered a no-no among designers, can actually be a very effective tool in focusing the user’s attention on the site’s various sections before they dive right into the content. Katharine’s use of the gentle blue and white gradient tile in the background and the clean look of the EO logo makes for a very soothing inital impression and prepares the viewer for a relaxing enjoyable time spent reading about Carrie and Michele’s vision of how we can all connect with each other and live our lives more fully.
One thing that was a fun challenge in developing the site was finding a way to display the beautiful navigational buttons Katharine designed without having to resort to javascript or tables. I found that giving the unordered list that contained the navigation its own id and then using relative positioning to place it on the page, then allowed me to style all of the links with some universal styles, such as visibility, borders, margins, padding and line-height (to fool IE into expanding the clickable area to cover the entire button). Then, giving each list item its own id gave me precise control over where the link was displayed via absolute positioning and also allowed me to display a different background (the various buttons) for each link.
Social networking, by its very nature, is also a big part of EOyourlife’s focus. In addition to the text links to Twitter and Facebook at the bottom of each page, I also installed the Add-to-Any plugin so users can easily share the site with friends. Also in use are the plugins; MailChimp/Analytics 360 to help maintain the newsletter email list and monitor site traffic, Cforms, for the site’s contact forms and All-in-One SEO pack to enhance the use of page titles and optimize the site’s content.
Check out EOyourlife.com and share the good vibes!
Posted 2 days, 11 hours ago at 4:13 pm. Add a comment
As much as everyone loves the NextGen Gallery by Alex Rabe (myself included), a comprehensive guide to how to actually use it seems to be as scarce as the proverbial hens’ teeth. The first time I installed it for a client, I have to admit the sheer amount of options and settings was a little overwhelming. At any rate, you came here for a manual so here it is. Continue Reading…
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago at 12:33 pm. 1 comment
-and I am itching to do some freshening up around here! This post by (Anti) Social Development is great for organizing your spring cleaning to-do list ! Continue Reading…
Posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:47 am. 1 comment
I’m happy to announce the existence of a brand new site for Parents United of Salem. Originally an HTML-driven site with a Collective-X management system in the wings, the new site is built on a Wordpress theme entitled YourBlog-20 created by Abhishek Tripathi. The site also required plugins such as NextGEN photo gallery and Simple Forum. I also installed CForms II but haven’t really utilized it yet. This was great experience in terms of expanding my WP knowledge. Since the site’s visual designer wanted to have different looks for different pages, I had to use templates for the various sections.
I had a couple of white-knuckle moments at the keyboard during some key points in development. The first was when I tried to install WP on a subfolder so I could let others track the new site’s progress. At first the install didn’t work, but after a little digging, it turned out that GoDaddy.com is responsible for that little comment on the wp-configure file that says “define(’DB_HOST’,'localhost’);//99.9% chance you won’t need to change this”. But on a Godaddy site, you DO have to change that to a particular address. When IE users told me that the Resources page wasn’t displaying properly, I had to dip into the IE7.css a little and tweak some stuff. Then, when I thought everything was all set to change to the root folder, the Resources page reverted back to its pre-css-tweak mess! After a little thrashing around, I found the culprit, a style declaration on the actual page’s template that was overriding the page’s conditional IE7 formatting. A little snip and Eureka! The page displayed correctly again.
All in all, a fun project and it felt good to be working on something that I could really relate too. It’s a great group of people and a really great resource for Salem families who want to connect to their community.
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 10:54 pm. Add a comment
