The site was designed by Impulse Nine Media, better known to Megan and Shannon as “Steve”.
That’s me. I believe in giving credit where it’s due, and I occasionally get questions about how the site was put together, so I decided to take a few minutes to describe the site.
The site’s fonts are part of the Fell Type collection, which were first printed in the late 1600’s and have been used on and off ever since. They are reproduced here thanks to the Google Web Fonts project/API. You can download it as a font here (at the bottom of the page).
I used the following palette for this and all Hops & Vines materials (names are derived from the incredibly-useful site Name That Color):
H&V Colors: Peach Cream (#FFF2DD) | Saffron Gold (#F2B736) | White Rock (#EBEBD6) | Earls Green (#B2C437) | Falu Red (#7A1314) | Fiord Blue (#445476) | Astronaut (#2D317C) | Ship Gray (#38343A) | Sober Shack Red (#EE3036) (from their logo) | Milan Yellow (#FFFEA0) | Rajah Peach (#F6B478) | Di Serria (#DB9F63)
The site itself runs on WordPress, with the Genesis platform by StudioPress. Its layout is based on the Associate Theme (demo page). I really love the Genesis platform. It’s stable, well-supported, and has a lot of great themes. It also has a huge developer user base and all the plugins that come from that. I’ve gotten business in the past from people whose business pages had been designed on other site builders, and they were often unstable. I’ve never had that problem with Genesis.
The essential plugins we use:
- WP Show IDs. Always the first thing I install.
- Gravity Forms. Seriously, the best plugin investment I ever made. I hate making HTML forms, and they make it easy. The conditional questions are super-cool, too, and their MailChimp integration is just perfect.
- Lightbox Plus is our image lightbox plugin.
- Specific CSS/JS for Posts and Pages makes the Sober Shack‘s unique styling possible.
- Facebook Events (an extension of Events Calendar) automatically dredges our Facebook events page for events.
Some of the other plugins we use:
- Our photo page is powered by Facebook Photo Fetcher, which gets all our photos from the Facebook page and dumps them onto the page.
- We’re admittedly not the most prolific bloggers, but SharePress publishes posts on Facebook for us.
- Better WP Security for basic WP protection
- A slew of Genesis plugins: Genesis 404, Favicon Uploader, Printstyle Plus, Simple Edits, and Slider.
- Trackable Social Share Icons was great because it allowed for custom icons and custom options. That’s why we can put TripAdvisor (with a custom icon I made) in our share icon row.
We use MailChimp for our newsletter, and I personally use the Adobe CS5.5 suite to do my work. I use Dreamweaver to work with the CSS & PHP, Illustrator to do the print work, and Photoshop to do all the web images (I use Fireworks as a glorified image compressor).
If you have any questions, please
.