We have a Joomla site built on a template already up, but we were never happy with it. The web designer was not capibile of working outside the template and it never got completed. It can be used as a reference site to the project. While I am capable of doing this project my time is much more valuable elsewhere in our production path hence the need for ongoing work as well. Lets go over the WordPress Project.
Our current site is www.sdnnow.com the overall page flow of the site will persist to the wordpress version.
There is a vbulletin forum involved as well and if you could actually do the customization work on that as well that would be a big plus.
So we are going for a very “Web 2.0″ look and feel (God I hate that term) so JS/AJAX is a good thing.
A very poor mock up/wireframe of the home page is attached. Please only use this as a rough estimate, the sizing and such is not accurate.
I feel there are 3 customized area’s of the site and the rest of the site should be able to be essentially templated. But lets take it page by page.
1) Home Page
- Logo and Header Area. Possible inclusion of RSS/Twitter/Facebook/Linked In Links. I say possible as there is a footer area that will display a bar of social networks that we are on and link to our presence so you may just want to leave it at RSS…. Newsletter Subscription would also be a good thing to have in this area.
- Main Navigation
- Ajax/JS “Spy” Fader Style Feed Display. This will pull for right now from a number of twitter feeds push them into an array and display them one at a time.
I can provide example code if necessary (from the web) it would be nice if we have the ability to bring in other styles of feeds (rss headlines and such).
- Coming Soon and Recent Releases Display.
This is an area that I certainly need some design help in. I will attach some examples of the styles, and for the coming soon area the example on the sdnnow.com site is ok. But i dont want the text to be on the side I want the text to either be under the image or floating and partially transparent on the image.
The recently released section should be different I was thinking a horizontal slider and a vertical slider. But again this part to make it look “BEST” I kind of leave to you. This does not need to be attached to the CMS portion of the site, but I guess if it can be done easily than that would be a bonus (Pulls from a category, which holds the individual posts that populate the displays) I know I have seen templates on template forest that do this.
http://www.kriesi.at/demos/twicet/
http://www.kriesi.at/demos/
http://www.kriesi.at/demos/?wptheme=SleekSlide
http://www.kriesi.at/demos/amplify/
(I am not opposed to using a template to speed up development if necessary, just tell me to pick one up and its done)
I really like the amplify slider and I love the way the sleek slide does the motion. Javanize is an example of a horizontal system. Now the question is how to get this to display and look good with both the Coming Soon And Recent Releases.
- Company text area… Just a block of text similar to what we have on the site already. Again does not need to be attached to the CMS but it would be awesome if it was.
- Recent News (Attached to the CMS system)
- Block Area for “Recent” News Items – Displays X# of headlines clicking should go to the news page for the article.
- Block Area for “Recent” Press Releases – Same as above just a different category.
- Social Network Line (32×32 or 64×64 icons that link to our presence on social networks and such)
- Footer Another possible location for mailing list but I think somewhere above the fold is better Ive seen it with both. Would contain copyright info and also be a link farm to our other websites
2) News/Press Releases Page
- Some sort of basic CMS page that would display the news items and press release items clicking the link would take you to the article page
3) Our Games and Websites (A better name for this is needed)
- In the sdnnow.com site we used a joomla plug in to create a catalog and elemenated the cart and check out features. At one point I had the system completly customized and working but my web designer at the time decided to take it into her own hands and changed it causing me to fire her….
There are some catalog plug ins for wordpress but I have no experience with them. The ability to enter in new projects and template the output is the main goal. I think this can be accomplished using custom fields and such in a worst case situation.
A) Main Catalog Page will show a graphical representation of the product and be grouped by social network (Category) . Clicking on a product will take you to a detail page, one thing to note.. a product can exist (and will) on multiple social networks (in multiple categories)
B) Product Detail, will show the product (by drilling into the existing catalog you can get to this page it was modified but you can get the idea) http://sdnnow.com/index.php?Itemid=2&option=com_zoo&view=item&category_id=14&item_id=1
Large Graphic on the side will be links to the games forum, screen shot gallery (lightboxed), games wiki page, icons to represent what categories (networks) it is on that will take you to the game. Eventually we will feed out game events from the game to a jquery spy scoller just leave room for it for now.
http://thenethernet.com/ is an example of what i mean with the scroller pushing out game events.
Under this will be text about the game.
4) Forums this will lead to our vbulletn forums.
- If you can do the css customization to match the web theme that would be great.
- If you can add a few mods to it (we have instructions its not hard just a time thing) that would also be great otherwise iframe or something it into the site so our navigation and footers persist.
5) About Us
Again this should be a simple CMS thing. About us is actually a few different sections once we finish it.
Our Company, Our People, Our Philosophy I assume these can just be categories and the text can just be posts. So there would be some form of navigation and the post.
6) Jobs
We wish to list the jobs we are currently hiring for. We want this in two pages. One with them all listed out and summaries and then the next page with details.
7) Contact
Just a simple template that we can put contact stuff into. (page template?)
Support
Just again another “Page” I think,… We would actually have some links in this as well as widgets that display information from our support systems. Just template this out and if its just a page style we can edit it in wordpress.
So really only the home page, the catalog and the jobs page I think pose any type of issue outside of standard wordpress stuff, and chances are someone with the experience with wordpress can bang this out.
I estimate 24-30 hours
We have logo’s, graphics, text, images that can be used
Now for a style guide. This is just a list of websites I’ve seen that I liked.
I like dark, but it should have some contrast to make it lively!
I do not like skinny sites… wide 95% if your going fluid
http://www.kontagent.com/
http://viximo.com/
http://jqueryfordesigners.com/
http://www.pikagame.com/
http://raptr.com/
http://www.playdom.com/
http://pickteams.com/#home
http://gowalla.com/
http://www.kriesi.at/demos/twicet/
http://www.kriesi.at/demos/
http://www.kriesi.at/demos/?wptheme=SleekSlide
http://www.kriesi.at/demos/amplify/
