We recently had the opportunity to revisit the Cooke Orthodontics site we launched in March, 2010. Ethan Marcotte was still a couple months away from publishing his first article about responsive web design in A List Apart at that point, so not at all surprisingly, the site was built with a fixed-width, centered layout. Dr. Cooke and her team were recently seeing a noticeable increase in non-desktop visitors to the site and asked if we could make that experience a little better. We agreed, of course, because we like good, device-agnostic web experiences as much as the next geek, but also because taking an existing design and retrofitting it to work across devices and screen sizes poses a number of interesting and fun challenges. (Well, what we call fun around here, anyway.)
Author Archives: Dan
Better Together Website’s Secret Recipe
The Better Together Baking website redesign updated an existing website using the same tools it was currently operating with, meaning WordPress and the popular WP e-Commerce plugin. The previous version of the site had been up for several years and had become a bit neglected over time. Additionally, much of the site’s content was not accessible the Bake Shop —many of the site’s two column page layouts, for instance, had only one editable column. This simply wouldn’t do!
We intend to provide our clients with a different experience, handing over as much control of their site as possible. With that in mind, we built two custom post types and a slew of custom meta boxes for the WordPress edit screens. These additions will not only make for a more easily editable site, but also help make clear to a user where and how they need to enter content for it to show up and work properly on the front-end.
