I gave this presentation on 18th July at WordCamp in Manchester, UK. It assesses how suitable WordPress can be for small nonprofit organisations and gives advice on working and volunteering in the voluntary sector.
Adam is a besom broom maker, spoon carver and woodturner. I recently overhauled his website so he can sell his carved spoons through an online shop.
The website uses a shopping cart called WP E-Commerce which enables customers to buy online and for Adam to receive payment via PayPal. This plugin is free although for about £20 you can uprade to a Gold Cart version with more capabilities. This is a small price to pay for a shopping cart which has, on the whole, been easy to install. >> Read more…
My latest website is unusual, in that it was built for a business rather than a nonprofit organisation. The Change Management Group is a business consultancy that’s based in the UK but has an international reach.
The Change Management Group wanted to use WordPress MU (Multi User) which is a version of WordPress that can host multiple blogs. WordPress MU can even be used to run communities of thousands of blogs. 99% of its code is identical to WordPress but that extra 1% enables you to do so much more. Although the site doesn’t currently host multiple separate blogs, the functionality is there for when they require it.
The Change Management Group also wanted me to install WP-Remix which is a premium (meaning you pay $75) theme for WordPress. It offers a way to get around the usual layout restrictions in WordPress by offering you a choice of templates for each page you edit. You want an extra column on your home page? You want a list of staff with thumbnail photos next to their details? Just choose the appropriate template. WP-Remix can be a bit buggy at times but the flexibility it offers makes it worth considering.
There are definite advantages to using a premium theme to build a website: the client can visualise what they’re going to get; premium themes are usually better coded than free themes; and they cut down on the design and coding work required if the site was to be entirely custom built; so you can jump straight into customisation.
Visit The Change Management Group‘s new website.
WordPress is a great product, which is why it’s installed behind most of the websites I design, but it doesn’t do everything out of the box. Fortunately there is a way to change and add new functionality to the basic CMS, and that’s by installing plugins. So which plugins do I install most often? >> Read more…
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