If you have seen this site in the last 24 hours, you may have spotted something new – yes – please welcome to the brand new Winwar Media design!
This design is the third design, and I wanted to do this for a while. The reason being is that the old site was a bit dated in the front end, and an absolute mess in the back. As such, it needed a tidy, and needed to bring it more in line with the rest of what I wish to do (which will be revealed below).
So without further ado, here’s what is new.
Plugins Page
The main change has been the redesign of the plugins section. There were a few issues with the old plugin area in that it was just static pages arrange hierarchically. Whilst this worked for a time, it became quite fiddly when adding plugins, in that there were a lot of pages to navigate, and they all had specific templates.
As such I standardised these as a plugin custom post type. It will allow me more control, and removed some redundant pages – for example the pages for WP Email Capture were effectively copies of the official WP Email Capture site, so there wasn’t really a need to have a page dedicated to WP Email Capture on this site. However, I still want there to be an association so when you click on this link, you go directly to the main site.
I’m looking to expand this with more information, with download buttons and ratings pulled in from WordPress.org.
Also, as an aside I’m looking to improve the branding of the plugins. You will notice the large icons on this page. This is deliberate, as these icons match the same icons in the WordPress 4.0 plugin dashboard. The hope is to build up some brand recognition on the site. So the hope that it will increase plugin downloads exponentially.
Reintroduction of the Blog
This is rather a selfish reintroduction, but I’m looking to reintroduce the blog.
Earlier this year, I spoke at WordCamp Manchester. It was probably the best thing I’ve done this year professionally, as I had never done any sort of serious public speaking before, and I really enjoyed it, sharing my knowledge amongst my peers.
But the best thing about it was that everybody shared their knowledge with me. I cannot pretend I know everything, and there were some incredibly smart people in that room. As such it was get to get constructive feedback on my talk, and get improvements on my workflow.
This blog will hopefully do the same.
In it I hope to share what I’ve learnt and found useful in the WordPress world. I also hope to spark discussion and get people commenting on this blog to suggest improvements to what I put out – trust me – I’m not the greatest coder, but know enough. I will aim to use the blog as a selfish way to improve my programming skills.
I’ve enough posts to keep me going until Christmas, with one a week, so at the very least it should allow me to get some standing. I’m also looking to send out email newsletters once a month, so if you want to receive it, please sign up at the bottom of the post.
Responsive & Flat Design
The final thing is that we’re now responsive and have a flat(ish) design. I have been using Peadig for a while which integrates with Bootstrap, which makes it brilliant for both of these things. The responsive issues on the old site is gone, and now it appears to look fine.
I’ve also (thanks to Bootstrap) improved the look of the buttons, which means that they stand out rather than the dated gradients. I’ve not gone for the hollow buttons that appear to be the rage right now, but I think they look smart.
Anyway, that’s an introduction to the new template. What do you think? Please let me know in the comments, as well as anything that looks a bit off. Thank you!
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