This website started as a WordPress site design, a free download. The customer had a few needs for modifying and setting up the template, which was no problem for My Favorite Web Designs chief designer and developer, Joshua Jacoby. Josh has modified countless templates, and understands creating a web template that works for CMS.

The first order of business was the sliding navigation pane on the front page. this uses simple jquery to show the images from the most recent posts, and use them as the pictures on the navigation. This all falls down when the post does not have an awesome image, and it is disappointing that the most prominent navigation in the site design structure is tied to posts – it should lead to prime real estate pages of the site, such as the services and contact. To rectify this, I modified the slider loop that tied into script to show the pages on the site, then locked it for the pages we want, reducing the overall query load on the WordPress server.

Next up some logo and footer action, then Nextgen gallery took care of the sidebar images, I widgetized the sidebar, a huge wordpress CMS advantage. The only annoying thing I will throw out there, for folks who have not done a ton of design, is that widgets do not transfer domains easily. they can transfer servers no problems, but the domain is hard coded into serialized data, which cannot be edited manually. The scripts for doing find and replace on serialized widget data also suck, resulting in having to basically rebuild widgets, so be wary of overusing them, they can really slow down your WordPress design.