In starting the title for this post with “Recent Work”, I use the term “recent” loosely. That’s because in today’s feature of what I’ve been working on, author and speaker Jana Spicka’s Women Getting Real website first went live nearly two years ago. Then we went live last summer with the redesign featured in this post. However, given the amount of work that Jana, her team and I put into the website, I’m certainly glad to share it with you today.
This time last year, Jana met with me to discuss what was and what wasn’t working with her website. She had a list of things she needed changed: the overall look-and-feel, the site navigation, the layout of page, the shopping cart and various other details.
That list began a several month redesign process where we worked back and forth on the design until we captured the vision that Jana had in mind. To do this, I started with the WordPress Mystique Theme as a base. It’s a free theme, available on the WordPress.org Theme Repository with a lot of features you might normally pay for.
We modified the theme’s header, its background, the main menu colors and the colors of the page elements. Then we added in features to make her site stand out:
- Featured Home Page Slides – I programmed a backend interface for adding “featured slides” on the home page. This let’s Jana’s web team highlight specific content on the site.
- Popup “Post-It Note” – First time visitors to the site are served a popup “Post-It Note” which the web team uses to share extra-important announcements.
- Separate Header for the Blog – We added a separate header for the blog to give a more “personal” feel to accompany the topics Jana covers there.
- Custom Online Store Layout – We used the Shopp Plugin for Jana’s online store, and I modified its layout to match the look-and-feel of the site.
You can visit the site at womengettingreal.com, or check out screenshots below:
