The problem: Epic Empire Designs started as a site built onto a content management system that was so hard to use, the owner couldn’t figure out how to upload a pdf! The manual came in broken English, which was no use to her. On top of all that, she had little control over the content and structure of the site, and worst of all, the blog led to another page entirely, which caused the user to lose all navigation to the rest of the site.
The mission: Epic Empire Designs needed a site that was easy to use, that could be changed easily, and that incorporated a blog with social media features.
The accomplishment: The site was re-built using the same graphics, but into a new system where a sliding home page banner could show the latest designs for fresh and constant advertising that wouldn’t go stale. Social media icons were added to the sidebar, along with a newsletter sign up box where users could sign up on the spot (rather than having to click through to other pages in order to do so).
A gallery was added with the ability to open images either in a browser slideshow or a thickbox slideshow. Easy-to-use widgets allow anyone at the company to change the order of sidebar items, top menu navigation and even to control what categories of posts appear on the home page. Now case studies are added frequently, and the avid blogger has a social media and twitter following that can collect responses and feedback straight on her web site.
Below are screenshots of the site:
The home page, with slider, customizable navigation menu, and customizable home page content.
The blog page, with an added right sidebar to make room for a Facebook fan page widget, plus latest tweets on the right sidebar. Each post is set to show only a limited amount of content, with a ‘read more’ link, to allow for easy scrolling. A thumbnail is automatically generated when inserting a photo into a post, adding visuals that help the user see what the post is about.
Epic Empire Designs does a lot of publicity work, and now they can upload those media articles to their site in pdf format! CSS customization allowed the uploads to always show a file type icon next to the download link to warn users what they would be downloading before clicking on the link.
Below the post are related post thumbnails, to increase the amount of page visits per user, encouraging them to read more posts and stay on the site longer.
The site owner can now insert a gallery onto any page or post, however, this has come in most useful for the gallery page, which is really important for a home stager to showcase their designs!
Users start by viewing an image list gallery and can chose to either click on a thumbnail to view the slideshow within the current page, or….
They can click on a link that opens up a shadow box for better visuals and effects!
