I recently completed an entire website recoding project for Rob McCarthy on his personal design site. Rob is a print, layout and web designer currently working for WDL Designs in Colchester.

This project came about when Rob’s new website design went live and I decided to take a look into the website code; as the website to all intense and purpose looked to be a blog site – and I’m always interested in other peoples coding techniques.

I was quickly surprised to see that although the site had the aesthetic of a blog; it was in fact a standard HTML and CSS site involving many HTML pages and over complicated CSS style sheets.

Original Index Page (click for full size)

Original Single Page (click for full size)

I contacted Rob via Facebook and proposed an entire recode of his site design into a more manageable WordPress site. By Rob’s own admission he leans far more toward design than code and was glad to accept my request.

The site was built within a fairly tight deadline as Rob had been already adding in content to his old site in order to build an online presence and wanted to continue doing so as soon as possible. The entire process from first proposal to completion took just under two weeks some time was lost due to re-hosting the website and a few other factors. The site took approximately 10-15 hours to fully implement.

Brief Overview

• Total site recode to a three-column WordPress site
• Reduced HTML code from approximately 1200 lines to 300 lines
• Reduced over 8000 lines of CSS across 16 style sheets to just 200 lines on one style sheet
• Reduced over 40 W3C errors to a complete pass
• Used a work-around to separate post text and post images from the_content
• Produced detailed documentation for Rob on using WordPress CMS, and provided HTML templates to create posts and news items

Obviously the most important part of this site design was that it completely streamlined the entire process of adding content to the site. Whereas Rob had previously been coding up individual HTML and CSS pages and then manually adding/removing content from the main index page and category pages, he is now able to just concentrate entirely on post content. The coding side is mostly now out of his hands, thanks in part to the powerful WordPress architecture.

Visit Rob McCarthy’s Website here: www.robmccarthy.co.uk

Categories: Theme Development • Wordpress

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