We recently designed and built a custom WordPress website for, Aimie Bene, our DJCAD Web Design Award 2011 Winner.

You can view Aimie’s site here (Opens in new tab/window)

Aimie is a Textile and Surface Pattern Designer as well a keen photographer and artist.

After being shortlisted to the final 3 applicants in our competition we chose Aimie as the student whos career we could help support the most with what we had to offer as a prize.

Aimie was able to assign her £2500 prize to any combination of our goods and services which she thought would help promote her and her work.

Along with the website we also created a logo and business card set (opens in a new tab/window), a custom facebook page, custom twitter page background and got 500 business cards printed for Aimie.

The website is largely based around an image gallery which is used to show off Aimie’s designs.  The gallery has 3 different custom layouts which we built, a vertical album listing, a grid gallery listing and a individual gallery listing.

Each layout pulls in a set of images from the database and the individual gallery also generates a vertical scroller powered by JQuery which allows vistors to see all the images in the gallery without it taking too much space up on the site.

The website also features a blog channel and Aimie can also use the WordPress content editor to change the content on her Custom Facebook Page!

We loved working with Aimie and wish her every success with her career. Hopefully the prize will help in some small way to helping her get the recognition and attention her work clearly deserves.

Quantum Energy was established in 2007 and provides Renewable Energy Technologies and Electrical Services to the Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Domestic markets..

They are very aware of their own impact on the environment. Their Carbon footprint has been assessed and the emissions offset. They also encourage their clients to use the EasyWEE recycling service for electrical waste products.

The new website design, which uses the WordPress content management system, required PHP, HTML, CSS, Flash and the JQuery library.

The site features a login form linked to their 3rd party CRM system as well as a newsletter subscription integration with their preferred service, Aweber.

The Voigt Partnership is an award winning creative multidisciplinary architectural practice. Over the last 25 years their work has been recognised both locally and nationally.

They pride themselves on providing innovative technically competent solutions to meet their clients wide ranging requirements from their offices in Arbroath, Scotland.

The new website design, which uses the WordPress content management system, required PHP, HTML, CSS and the JQuery library. The site features an extensive photo gallery to show off their large portfolio of stunning design projects.

The project gallery is entirely custom built using JQuery and PHP and features animated vertical-sliding menus and a rotating project gallery which cycles though all the images for the particular project.

The client has full control over all the most important and regularly used aspects of the site such as addition of new images to the gallery and adding new projects to the site.

Mobile Devices is a company that specialises in vehicle embedded electronics and software.

They have sold nearly 250,000 units world wide, more than 450 successful integration projects under their belts and round one funding of more than €3,1 Million.

Hit Reach were commissioned to build a website for the company which required an easy-to-use, open source content management system.

The new website design, which uses the WordPress content management system, required php, html and an up-coming technology called PIE which is used to add CSS 3 features to Internet Explorer to make the design appear identical to how it’s displayed in the other browsers.

The technology enables gradients, rounded corners and shadows to be rendered in CSS instead of images making the site lighter in file size and easy to change in the future.

The overall site consists of multiple blog channels for Press Releases, Event News, Partner News, Product News and Case Studies about their products.

This website also utilised multiple sidebars which are selected on a page by page basis.

We also created a WordPress plugin to allow the editors to embed some of their most frequently used snippets of code on the site by inserting simple shortocdes. This allows them to re-use the same snippets in multiple locations on the site whilst only having to update it in one place to effect a sitewide change.

City Thursday is an investment research club designed to provide the very best investors with improved insight and guidance.

We were commissioned to build a website for the private members club which required a public front end with members only area as well as an extremely flexible but easy to use backend system for the admins.

The following is a breakdown of what the project involved:

Custom voting form

• A % based voting form with a number of ‘credits’ to vote with
• Each user is only allowed to vote once
• New voting forms can be created by an admin
• Voting results are displayed utilising Google Charts API
• Users are able to suggest new voting topics
• If less than 10% of users have voted a message is displayed
• Voting can be set to close on a set date or closed early by an admin
• The form  is powered by JQuery
• Users can retrospectively alter their vote
• If a vote is accidently closed it can be re-opened without forgetting what users have previously voted
• Admins can choose which vote is to be displayed on the past vote page via a dashboard widget

Home page

• Custom login page to allow front end logging in. (does not use wp-login.php which is the standard)
• Home page automatically shows different screen if the user is logged in

User information

• Full privacy setting controls using a Show/Hide system to allow users to choose what information they display to other members
• Ability to search members on the site based on their profile information, but accounting for privacy settings (e.g. searching Secretary in job title wont find any Secretaries with their job title hidden)
• Custom profile completion bar showing the user the percentage of their profile has been completed
• User can change their password at any time, and can choose their own password upon registering
• When registering, users require confirmation before they can access the site and its logged in features
• There is a dashboard widget for all registered users, allowing administrators to delete users as well as approve/deny newly registered users

Emails

• Administrators have controls over the content in all the emails sent to users, included who the email is from, and the subject line of the email, as well as message content.

Dashboard widgets

• There is a widget on the dashboard to allow administrators to get an instant download of All users, users that have voted in a particular vote, users that have not voted in a particular vote
• There is a widget to control the text displayed on the unsubscribe page thanks

User nominations

• Users can nominate people to join the site, nominated people get emailed a link to the site with a pre populated registration page, nominated users  still have to be approved before they can access site content
• Nominations are tracked though the dashboard widget, allowing administrators to follow up on nominations.

We have just completed building a website for the Singing Waiters.

Based in Arbroath, the Singing Waiters is a muscial act covering Scotland & Ireland providing the highest quality international opera and music theatre stars masquerading as characters or guests at corporate functions, weddings & private events.

They needed a site they could easily update themselves which incorporated a blog, gallery and testimonials page.

We built the site in WordPress for them so they can easily add and edit pages and have multiple authors and contributors helping with the website.

The site incporporates a blog which allows them to add images and customer quotes to posts which then get automatically added to the gallery and testimonial pages as well as the other promotional areas of the site.

This lets them quickly update the whole site from one screen instead of having to update the site in lots of places manually.