Client: WIA

Platform: WordPress | Role: UI, UX, Design, Developer, CSS, HTML, PHP

Brief: Arts magazine/journal; custom coded wordpress website to present serious artistic discourse to an instagram savvy, mobile first audience

Challenge

A complete WordPress site and rebrand overhaul. The basic demand of this brief was to install a new theme which would transform the front-end into a clean, modern, responsive website which could maximise the display and the depth of content to coincide with a streamlining of the brand identity whilst delivering a modest monetization/advertising device. Sadly, a single theme that can do all that and more doesn’t really exist so we went about creating one.

It needed to be fully responsive with a strong focus on phone and tablet functionality for a rich UX aimed primarily at a female, Instagram savvy market.

Given the client’s perception of the brief was slightly underestimated, one of the main challenges here was to deliver as much of the required functionality whilst staying within a particularly modest budget.

So the starting point was to find a theme that could provide a suitable starting point, in this case ‘Photo-me’ and then integrate any necessary functionality plugins and take it from there. The main focus was put upon the main content areas of news, in-depth features, artist profiles, WIA events, reviews and potential advertising opportunities.

Methods

With a suitable starting-point template installed, we set about customizing the child-theme with the aim of delivering the functionality whilst still being fully future-proofed when updated and compatible with any theme or WordPress codex changes. Multiple custom page templates were added, primarily with modified PHP and styled in CSS accordingly.
Similarly the inclusion of plugins had to both be effective and robust in equal measure. For example the “Promotional” plugin, not purely in the specific configuration of that functionality but also the necessity to add accurate analytics features and SEO measures to drive traffic.
There was also a significant degree of third-party API integration, Zapier tweet integration, an Instagram feed, and the obligatory automated Mailchimp RSS feed delivery – all of which have added to a continually growing and engaged audience.