Sporting what is without a doubt the hardest visual layout I’ve made to date, the St Joes site is a vibrant step ahead in terms of colour and complexity from their previous website which was starting to feel a little aged now.
Simply in terms of presentation, this site was difficult at best. Having multiple backgrounds (blue and green repeating shapes, the abstract green header, the white content area and the blue footer) was a pain to get to display properly. In addition, dealing with the cross-browser compatibility issues when using advance features of CSS (those new in the 3.0 spec and those not yet fully implemented) meant for many hours of frustration getting it just *perfect.*
But I must say, the end results were worthwhile. I love the look of this site, and huge kudos to Trina Irons of IronsDesign.com who designed it.
The site is, like usual, based on a WordPress backend. It uses features such as custom post types (for the calendar) and different post types to sort information, posts and events into relevant sections. It also makes heavy use of the menu system for the three menus that appear on the page (header, middle and footer) so that the staff can take complete control of the navigation on the site.
In addition, after I smooth out a few rough edges, I’ll be releasing the calendar management plugin I created for the site that implements WordPress’s custom post type system.
