Adventures Online congratulates Your Gift Certificate for the recent launch of their WordPress website. The website is for the new homebuyers who have received Your Gift Certificate’s housewarming gift package.
First, Your Gift Certificate (YGC) worked with Clapp Design to define the website design. Once signed off, the design and specs were handed off to me (Karen Callahan of Adventures Online).
The website build requirements were:
- The website should look the same across viewing devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, cell phone) (Responsive design).
- New homebuyers should be able to add their story with minimal data required.
- Homebuyer’s stories should be held for review, and not immediately published.
- Homebuyer’s stories should be published to the public immediately upon approval by the YGC staff.
- Staff should be able to add and remove at will the advertisements running down the right hand side.
- There should be two sets of advertisements, one set used on one type of page and another on another type of page.
- Staff should be able to update content of the web pages at any time.
The solutions included…
- WordPress was used as the base. That addressed the ability to update content on pages, manage pages and posts, and made responsive design easier to accomplish.
- Custom PHP, a WordPress plugin, and CSS were used to complete the responsive design aspect of the website.
- Custom PHP programs were used to:
- Create a custom form for the data entry of the homebuyer’s story
- Display the Thank You page the homebuyer is shown
- Send a message to the office that a new story was created
- Store the user and the story in the WordPress database
- WordPress roles were used to hold the homebuyers’ stories unpublished until approved by YGC staff.
- Custom sidebars written in PHP were added to the WordPress installation in order for YGC to manage the two sets of advertisements.
Shortly after the launch of the website, Adventures Online provided a WordPress training session where YGC staff learned standard WordPress maintenance like updating content on the pages and posts, as well as how to maintain the custom aspects of the website like the advertisements on the sides of the pages.
Website maintenance is now100% in the hands of YGC. We wish YGC much luck with their newly designed WordPress website. (See how the collaboration between Clapp Design and Adventures Online worked out: Your Gift Certificate)