Hey, I have a photography portfolio site that is 90% finished going cheap. Unfortunately (and I’m not afraid to say this) I got well and truly shafted by a client who dropped the project right at the end. Looking back it was my own fault and I have learned some valuable lessons about how I run my freelance projects. Anyways…

This is a semi-static site, meaning the main pages of text content are uneditable unless you know how to use an html editor. This is no bad thing so don’t let it put you off – About pages and Services pages rarely change and if they do its normally very small additions or amends that I can help out with. With a photography site arguably the most important area is the portfolio or gallery of images. With this site all the photos are managed through Flickr. I have set up different galleries on the site which link to different ’sets’ on Flickr. Each time you add photos to a particular Flickr set, the website gallery is automatically updated. Free and simple to use. Here are some screenshots…

I’m selling this site for £200 and this will include updating the content to reflect your business and linking the site to a Flickr account.

Alternatively if you want to be able to self manage the site in it’s entirety, I can convert it into a Wordpress driven site. This will allow you to change content, add pages and much more through an easy to use interface. Obviously this will cost a little more – £300.

As the site isn’t totally finished there are a few quirks happening on some browsers and certain things aren’t working right. For best results view in Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Internet Explorer 8 – basically it won’t work properly in IE6 & 7. When the site is ready for launch it will work in all modern browsers.

You can view the work in progress at: http://boxadesign.co.uk/hayleyhughes

Just leave a comment or fill in the form on the main site if you want to know more.

The other great thing about wordpress is the ability to scale it up using things like plugins and custom fields. I recently finished a site for an online store using Wordpress and the WP-Ecommerce plugin. It’s a full proper functioning E-Commerce CMS with everything you would expect and it was all free and built using Wordpress.

There are many different ways to build a site using Wordpress and I thought it would be useful to run through some of the different options available to us web designers and where these resources can be found.

Working off the standard ‘Kubrick’ theme -

This is how I started making Wordpress sites. You install Wordpress, make a copy of the ‘default’ folder, change it’s name and then go at the code. It works well, doesn’t have too much already going on and has all the necessary files. Good for begineers who can see how the code is laid out and how the loop works.

Using a theme development framework and child themes -

A framework is designed to speed up the theme development process for developers. There are many available and some are pretty full on but if you know you’re php then a framework will cut out all of the unwanted repetitive coding allowing for more time spent on product features.

Here are some of the more popular frameworks available:

Thematic – Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.

Thematic uses Child Themes, these are essentially stripped down versions of a full WP theme, that needs the Thematic Framework for functionality.

Visit the Thematic site

WP framework – This serves as the starting point in WordPress theme development. It accomplishes this by providing you with commonly used functions and features that modern WordPress themes should have. So when you start a brand new WordPress project, using WP Framework you’ll already have the basic functionality set so you don’t have to worry about mundane task like creating the loop, or recreating all the standard template files.

Visit the WP framework site

Carrington – This framework provides a way of organizing a WordPress theme, coupled with a core framework engine that provides a bunch of exciting functionality for free, just by creating different named templates. The Carrington framework is a completely additive framework. It builds on the existing core WordPress theme structure and functionality and uses core WordPress theme functions for easy adoption by experienced theme authors. Possibly the most powerful of all frameworks available.

Visit the Carrington site

Barebones themes -

Another option and my personal choice to create Wordpress sites is to use a barebones theme. These are stripped out themes that just give enough to make the site function. It’s a good progression from working off the kubrick theme and allows to build the site without having to do any of the pre-stripping.

Here are a cpuple of the more popular barebone themes available:

Starkers – This is what I’ve recently started using. It’s basic but works for me and my level of knowledge of themeing Wordpress. Starkers is a bare-bones WordPress theme created to act as a starting point for the theme designer. Free of all style, presentational elements, and non-semantic markup, Starkers is the perfect ‘blank slate’ for your projects, as it’s a stripped-back version of the ‘Default’ theme that ships with WordPress.

Visit the Starkers site

Gravy – A set of baseline Photoshop files and WordPress templates that work in conjunction, enabling front-end designers to rapidly create, slice and build mockups. For designers new to WordPress and CSS, Gravy is also a great learning tool as it clearly illustrates the relationship between design, code and PHP using consistent patterns and naming conventions.

Visit the Gravy site

There are many many many more options within these categories for any designer or developer to choose from – if you really wanted to do you can just purchase a nice theme ready made a slap on your clients logo…but that’s no fun. Personally I love getting into Wordpress and am steadily learning about it’s capailities to make better and more functional websites. I’m nowhere near calling myself a php developer but Wordpress is helping me edge closer to understanding how I can make sites work better for my client.

Sometime in the next two years though the IB is changing dramatically and my office will be closing and moving to The Hague in the  Netherlands. For personal reasons I have decided that I won’t be going. So, I’m hoping that at the end of my time at the IB I will be ready to work for a studio or agency or try out some freelancing for real. I say ‘ready’ as I still think I’ve got lots of refining to do both in design and coding.

I thought it would be worth compiling a list of all the design studios and agencies in Cardiff that I know of or like for future reference. There’s quite a few agencies now in Cardiff producing some really nice work so I thought it would be nice to blog about them and showcase their work to a potentially international audience.This list is by NO means exhaustive and by all means leave a comment with the website of any agency I haven’t included. Chances are I simply haven’t heard of them.

1. Hoffi – website | twitter

Hoffi are a design agency based in Cardiff Bay. They advertise themselves primarily as branding specialists but they also have a pretty high profile web portfolio too. Furthermore, they specialise in bilingual communications projects (being Welsh this is a good earner and they do it well). They have also worked for my organisation -  the IB in creating the Community Theme website and (inadvertantly) creating the consistent look and feel that you see across all IB sites.

2. Burning Red – website | twitter

Burning Red are another agency based in Cardiff Bay. They produce ‘edgy’ work (even though I hate describing anything as ‘edgy’ I have allowed myself to use it here) and have produced work for some of the ‘cooler’ companies in Cardiff. Not sure what’s going on with them at the moment as their website is just a holding page so it could hopefully mean a new website coming soon.

3. Carbon Studio – website | twitter

Carbon Studio are web design and gaming agency based in (you’ve guessed it) Cardiff Bay. I don’t know a great deal about their work but they have a flash driven website with some nice interactive things going on. Their portfolio shows a mix of online flash based games and websites for clients such as the BBC. What I do like about this company is that have an environmental policy and try to work on projects that have a carbon neutral output. Nice!

4. Box UK - website | twitter

Box UK are a long established web design, development, agency, consultancy, seo, graphic design etc etc. They do it all and they also have a nice office too, not in Cardiff Bay but in the city centre next to a nice tapas bar. They are a big company with offices in London aswell and they have a long list of high profile clients. Nice clean modern website that’s full of stuff worth checking out.

5. Sequence - website | no twitter?

Sequence are a digital agency that have been going for ages (1996 according to their website). They’ve worked with many of the big Welsh companies and organisations – BBC, Brains Beer, Welsh National Opera and even Doctor Who. They have a large remit of digital offerings and are one of the most agencies in Cardiff.

6. Mark Boulton Design - website | twitter

Mark Boulton is a globally known designer, speaker and author on all things web related. He has worked with some of the biggest companies in the online world most recently Drupal. His small design agency is based in Penarth and it seems from Marks’ Twitter that he’s never there but constantly trekking the globe speaking at various events. News is they are working on a new site design at the agency which will be interesting to see and hopefully online soon.

7. Creo - website | no twitter?

Creo are a web development agency sat round the corner from Box UK. I see these guys as more of a techy type web agency than a heavy design focussed agency but their designs are nice and straightforward. Creo are responsible for creating the back end for the International Baccalaureate website (cold fusion) which I now manage. They’ve been going for ages and have good long list of decent clients.

Okay so that’s like my top 7. They are the ones that I have heard of and/or like what they do and how they work. Below is a list of some of the other design agencies and studios in Cardiff that I stumbled across…

• Rootsy
• Congem
• Jerboa
• Spindogs
• Calm Design
• Widelode
• IC web design
• Vividiti
• Amber Couch
• Blue Stag Studio

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