Portfolio: WheelWizards (DriveRight)
Development work for Lockside Software.
Brief
Build a new site to replace the existing site (~20 pages, 10 languages/locales). The site should be built on WordPress to allow the owners to easily update their content, and must conform the the styling laid out in the style guide document produced by their graphic designer.
Solution
The site was built on WordPress, using the qTranslate plugin to handle the 10 different languages. The design was based around grey text on a while panels which were set on grey background panels. This produced a nice clean design, but meant that it was important to get all the margins and padding right for it to look clean. To give full control over this, I built the theme from scratch based on the Underscores starter theme.
As the site had 10 different languages it meant that the menus and content panels would have have significantly different widths and heights of text depending on which language was selected. This required careful styling to allow it to be flexible enough to fit in the different sizes of text, but not leave too much blank space in languages where the text is shorter. The design also needed to be responsive, so it would fit appropriately on devices of different widths.
Much of the content was based around a column layout, the “Easy Columns” plugin was used to give the structure to build these columns, while allowing access to easily update the content. The product index page was built as a new page template showing the summaries and featured images of each of the child pages, used to represent each product. These templates were later re-used on the job pages.
Phase 2
Convert the site to use WordPress Multilingual (WPML) plugin to allow more effective use of the Yoast SEO plugin.
