New client for wordpress design
During the last few weeks I have quoted and won a web design job for a local council inititive. This has now replaced the previous client who decided not to progress the wordpress design.
The client.
Northern Marches Cymru are who I will be providing a service for and they have specified the use of the existing logo and that the site should have a local, community feel to the design. I attended an initial meeting recently where I was able to ask different design questions in regard to source images and text and the main focus ofthe site from there point of view. The client has specified a deadline at this stage for the ‘go live’ date due to another event running that they would like links to and the need the site live for then.
First steps
Included in the quote were three sample designs that I had produced in Photoshop as sample layouts and the client made it clear thay would like to progress with one of them. With this in mind and being concious of the deadline in a month, I began last week registering the domain names that were requested by the client and hosting with an ISP I have dealt with many times over the years: Virtual Names. Once this had been purchased and confirmed online I was able to login to the control panel of the domain and setup databases. From my experiments a few months ago I had a good idea of how to setup WordPress on a server and naming the database and changing the wp-config file to match was all ok. This time however I had a new issue – the site had to be bilingual. I searched WordPress.com for advice on translation plugins and found a well rated one from Google that was free to download and install. I did this and then uploaded it to the WordPress Plugins folder on the new domain and was able to configure it easily for welsh and english. The plugin provides a link under text with ‘translate’ and a drop down menu to choose language (very simple). The one area of this plugin that I would like to investigate further is if it can change the text on the navigation and in addition to the text on a blog post or page? If it cannot then I may have to have two seperate websites (one english, one welsh) to save the fluid nature of the language throughout instead of being ‘patchy’.
I was also able to install a plugin for removing spam and also a plugin that will help with images (I will explore these two more fully later on). I feel that the plugin feature is a fantastic tool and really helps you find an easy solution to a clients requests such as bilingual text. I will also be looking at widgets soon but next will begin writing the new CSS and adapting my original php pages from my initial experiment with my own site at www.theiceage.co.uk/wordpress
