Welcome to our new website!  As the resident website technical guy, I plan to introduce a few of the new features of the website in a series of blog posts over the next few weeks.

One of the first things you will notice is the sweet transparent design done by that genius graphic designer on the east coast, Kyle Smith.  With a striking background image and floating text, it really makes the content stand out.

A big element on the front page is the carousel where you can find graphics introducing all the latest events that will be taking place, and you can even click on them.  One of the things we want to do is give the user more control, and the carousel includes a stop/start button and tabs to click between the scrolling images.

For those technical minded people, the entire website is built with WordPress and about ten core plugins, two of which are heavily customized.  In our previous incarnation of the website, it used three backend scripts, TYPO3 for content management, WordPress for this blog and Magento for the shopping cart.  The result was that it created three different interfaces for clients, and here are screen shots of two of them:

Using multiple programs like TYPO3, WordPress and Magento was a hassle because menus had to be copied between them.  As the website administrator,  I had been using all three for over a year and it added a lot of unnecessary work and presented a crappy interface to the user.  To keep the menus synced, it was necessary to take the menu generated by TYPO3 and copying all those changes into both the blog and shopping cart designs manually. With everything in WordPress, it handles menu generation all in one place.

In the next blog, I will write about the drop down everyone now has available at the top of their page:

Until next time, cheers,

Sean Donovan

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