We recently re-imagined our long time client Monterey Masonry’s website in a new WordPress version.
In order to have both sites available for view while the changes were happening, we setup the WordPress version to have links on the right side of the page going to the WordPress pages, galleries, stone management section and posts. These links replaced the links on the old flat page version of the site on the left hand side.
While the build was happening, the WordPress version was hidden from search engines.
For the pages with changed colors for some sections, we added back the important Monterey logo (which we designed way back in 2003) at page header and site navigation. That way, visitors are assured that they have not ‘left’ the site when the background colors change.
The Antique Stone section is an inventory management system that is more likely to be kept populated with their current inventory.
Monterey’s requests for better image management, a stone inventory system and ability to easily add new items to the site, clearly indicated the need for a site that is dynamically generated and managed by a central password protected area. All their requirements are easily handled by he WordPress system.
We attempt to give the visitor the same type of visit experience and ergonomics they expect, based on their experience visiting other sites.
The old site was built eons ago in web terms and used <table>’s for page structure for compatibility with the browsers of that time. This method is now deprecated, and we have tried to minimize use of tables to only where it is expedient (to maintain the center layout areas) and have used <div>s for page structure.
This adheres to current convention and allows better display of the site on current and future devices.
It becomes possible to display links to items they would like to feature site-wide. For instance, links to the Sale stone items categories can be displayed on every site page.
The ability to make small changes propagate site-wide is one of the major pluses of using a dynamic web software.
By posting, the staff can display last minute or late-breaking news features. They can create posts about new lots of stone items, or recent job images, or classes owner Mark Mendel may be teaching, and have the links to this immediately indexed by Google. It is possible for in-office staff to make simple one, two image, and text postings.
Visitors can subscribe to this site. Any time new content is posted, they will receive a ‘teaser’ email linking to your new post.
All pages and posts on the site have social media share buttons, so that visitors can post an image and link to their page on their Facebook or Twitter account. This can be much more effective that just having a link to your own Facebook or Twitter account.
All the site material is easily acessable and editable from the site Dashboard. We can make incremetal changes in how and where links to material is displayed to “feature” some material and lessen any hunting for relevant content that might be required by the casual visitor.
Because Google is going to be their biggest visitor by far, we have installed a state-of-the-art automatic meta tag writing engine to give every page on the site a unique auto-updating description meta tag.
In addition, Google has always given more attention to blog sites because, by nature, they tend to be updated much more often then ‘flat page’ sites (what they had before).
All your gallery pages have been converted to use a gallery system, where adding/removing and re-ordering display of uniform image thumbnails is easily managed.
By using WordPress to manage the site, we were remaking this site the right way, for the way the internet works now.