Two sites in two weeks

As some of you may know, Existem and Existem Events recently became two independent sites. As a result I was tasked with their re-design, development and re-structure. We’d all been pretty happy using wordpress as a CMS  for the previous version of the Existem site so I decided it was still the way to go for this version and for existemevents.com too. Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s new:

Features and helping hands

To make the site more dynamic and more akin to CMS usage I’ve used the truly excellent more fields plugin in addition to coding my own write boxes. This means we can add custom content such a post images and links via the wordpress admin panel.

I’ve used a nice script called ‘TimThumb’. This is a good little php plugin of image resizing. This was a really important feature of the site as this means that any member of staff can upload an image for each post without needing to resize it in an editing package. Very handy

I’ve also used a plugin called Google Libraries that servers scripts such as jquery from google.  This is preferable to me over the local install.

Finally, for a bit of legibility and in one case, pure gloss, I’ve added the wp typography plugin. This has some nice features such as preventing widows and orphans, styling ampersands and better spacing of certain typographic elements.

CSS, bits and bobs

I’ve started bringing in more and more CSS3 elements along side webkit and mozilla specific styles. I’ve been doing this for some time but with firefox 3.5 being released just last week more and more of them are being implemented now to a wider audience.

A few that you might see floating around include box shadows, text shadow, CSS variables, opacity, multi-columns  and RGBA colours. Of course, there are no repercussions for users if they’re not using the most up-to-date version of their browser, the sites should site look pretty slick on IE7+, Firefox 3, Opera 9(ish), Safari 3+. IE6 even gets a nice version too.

Over and out

We hope you like the sites. I do aim to post a few bits of technical information behind them (be that wordpress code, html or css) but it would be nice to know if there is anything in particular you would like to hear about. If you see something we’ve done that you like, or if you have an idea on how we can improve please leave a comment for us below.