Week 12

This past week I spent going through the "About" sections of the site.  I decided that it made sense to break out the section into multiple parts.  Most of the Ajiri Tea website is text explaining certain aspects of the business and the people involved.  Here are the following sections:

• About the Company
• About the Tea
• About the Labels (packaging)

For both the tea and labels sections I thought it made sense to break down these sections further.  For instance, when learning more about where the tea comes from I thought it would be useful to read a brief description, delve into the process that brings the tea from the ground to your doorstep, and then display a gallery showing pictures of the tea, farms, and workers that produce the tea.  This natural grouping of content allowed me to create the following sub sections:

• About (Tea/ Labels)
• Process for creating (Tea/ Labels)
• Gallery (Tea/ Labels)

I spent time adding some visual ques to these pages.  That includes adding image headers to the sections, and creating the gallery functionality.  With WordPress you can create a gallery using the gallery tag, from the wysiwyg, or you can loop through the attachments on the page and display all of those images.  I chose to do the later so that I would have more flexibility to display the images.

Moving Forward:

• Start working on presentation
• develop a story
• Also, try to do this on the site
• develop visio diagram ( address book, news articles, wordpress ERDs)
• Talk with my client (see if she has enough content for an awards/ testimonial section of the site)
• Would like to use lightbox to display the images in their full size on the gallery pages. 
• Need to include the brochure on the homepage. 
• Need to reduce the size of the company brochure. 
• Would like to make the "News" & "Search" sections more robust. 
• Plus I need to start clearning up my code and establishing a style for the site.
• Need to hook into social media (facebook & twitter at least).
• Style side navigation to make links bigger, easier to click/ see (label like links)
• Style the main navigation to make it less blocky (Larger plain text, with underline on hover?)
• style "the process" section of the "about" pages

Week 11

This was another week of continued template work.  I now have a total of 20 template pages on my site.  The template pages are pages that determine how content will be displayed from the WordPress database. I developed templates that would display:

·      Single pages

·      Search results

·      News links

·      About pages

·      Gallery

I also focused on side navigation, for the about pages.  The idea for the about section had been split into information about the company, the tea, and the labels.  Now both the labels and the tea sections have 3 sub pages, a general about section, an about the process section, and a gallery section.

I also spent time adding Google Maps links to the addresses on the find a store section.  Now users can select this link from the list of stores and see the store plotted on a google map, this allows them to quickly access directions to the store. 

Week 10

This week was spent cleaning up some of the stuff that I had done hastily earlier on, or had basically just dummied up and left as a mental “to do”.  I took the time to setup a constant contact form on the home page so that users can opt in to receive a semi-annual newsletter.  I also added a contact form to the contact us section.  This form accepts a general message and emails that message to the company owners.   The find a store section that features a map of the United States needed an update as well.  I added a list of states with stores in it.  This meta information is presented as a list of links next to the map.  The user can click into this list of links or select a state from the map and the store information will appear. 

I also spent some time corresponding with my client, and she indicated that they would like a green color scheme for their site.  She also provided me with access to some photo albums that she posted on Google+.  

Week 9

This week I spent a lot of time doing research and finalizing the standards that I would like to use when developing in WordPress.  One of the reasons that so many people use WordPress is that it’s very simple to use.  You add information into html forms on the admin side, and content displays on the user side in the form of a webpage.   Instead of choosing a pre-built template, I decided to make my own.  

WordPress gives you multiple ways to display information stored in the database.  They have a variety of built-in functions that display post information.  There are actually four different ways to loop through post content, all which have the same result but are implemented differently.

For my template I chose to loop through the posts by using the get_posts() method.  To do this you define an argument array that describes the type, number, and category of information that you would like to display.  This returns a post object, which you then loop through to output information. 

Here is a description of the different kinds of way to loop through WordPress data:

http://digwp.com/2011/05/loops/