Feaverish

What with all the travel I almost forgot to mention two sites I recently finished.

The first is 2betr.com, a site detailing the benefits of the insulin pump.

2betr has a lot of pretty cool features, not the least of which is the fact that it’s run entirely by WordPress. The article in the first text column on the homepage is actually one of several WordPress “Posts” that appear randomly when you re-visit the site (or hit refresh). The client can add a new article to the rotation simply by writing a new Post. The article in the second column—and the rest of the pages in the site—are simply WordPress “Pages.”

This was also the first site I designed using absolute positioning for most of the layout. It was absolutely (ha!) fantastic to add a few simple declarations to the style sheet and see the results look exactly the same in every browser—something I’ve never experienced before. The problem was the footer. Where to put it in the HTML, and how to make it appear underneath the absolutely-positioned elements above it? The solution was Shaun Inman’s Clear Children JavaScript, which basically identifies the tallest column in your layout and assigns it relative positioning. The client can add a very long or very short article to either of the two main text columns and the footer will automatically appear underneath whichever column is longer. It works great, and it’s simple to set up.

It’s all valid XHTML Strict and CSS, of course, and the Flash slideshow on the main page uses Bobby van der Sluis’ excellent Unobtrusive Flash Objects JavaScript to detect visitors’ Flash version and show either the slideshow or a static image with links to Adobe’s Flash install page. The WordPress plugins I used are:

Customizable Post Listings: displays posts (or parts of posts) using pretty much any criteria you specify. On 2betr.com, this plugin powers the randomly rotating article in the first text column on the front page.

WP-Email: adds that neato “email to a friend” link to any page. Pretty snazzy, really, and it lets you customize pretty much any information in the email that is sent.

Improved Include Page: lets you include the content of any page anywhere you’d like in your template. On 2betr.com, it generates the second article on the home page.

Run PHP: lets you run PHP code in a WordPress Page or Post. On 2betr.com, this let me add the PHP-powered WP-Email plugin to the Posts on the front page (which are generated by the Customizable Post Listings plugin and don’t have any template of their own).

WP-ContactForm: adds a nice little contact form wherever you want. In 2betr.com’s case, on the contact page and in the second column article on the front page.

WP Tiger Administration: pretties-up the WordPress administration pages. Eye candy only.

The second site I made is Clean Copy dot com, a small business website. I designed it over a year ago, but we only got around to putting it up a couple of weeks ago. It’s nice and simple, and, hopefully, clean. Clean Copy had a previously existing web hosting company, and unfortunately their servers didn’t allow any PHP or anything, so the site’s just a bunch of html pages and a stylesheet; no WordPress goodness or anything. Also, the rather odd looking File Upload page is the result of me having to just add a new header to the company’s existing ColdFusion-based file uploader. Not a lot of creative control there.

There’s a bit of text-shadow goodness as well, so try to check it out in Safari if you can. Does Opera 9 support text shadows? I think it might. Anyway, go kick the tires, check under the hood, etc.