Welcome to the new Wheatley Copywriting website!
There are snazzy new things here, which I hope will help people find what they want to know about my services more easily. There’s a new portfolio with testimonials, descriptions and excerpts for each entry. There’s a new and better-designed blog. And there’s a dynamic home page that brings everything together in one place.
I’m proud to say that I ‘made’ this website myself. But I could never have done it without the amazing support of the WordPress community.
WordPress is the Internet at its best
I started out in January of this year with a child theme of the current WordPress default, Twenty Eleven. My plan was to change the look slightly and then just add my content. That didn’t happen.
I kept getting little ideas for making the site better. Ways to make the site more my own, and more useful for my customers. And every time I dreamed up one of these new features, the method for creating it was always just a search or a question away.
That’s because the WordPress community is brilliant. They design beautiful themes anyone can use. They solve problems and share the answers freely. They help each other out. It’s the original Internet dream in action.
So I’m saying a big thank you. With WordPress, even a PHP beginner like me has been able to make a pretty great website for nothing.
Are you making a Twenty Eleven child theme?
I know a lot of people out there are in the middle of doing the same thing. So here’s a list of some of the guides and plugins I used to make it. I wish it was a more complete list, but I didn’t keep as good a record of these things as I should have.
- The Portfolio Post Type plugin by Devin Price, which I used to make my portfolio
- WordPress.org forum thread on how to make featured posts ‘auto-slide’ on the Showcase template
- A good guide to using thumbnails/featured images by Mark Jaquith
- Flexible Lightbox plugin, which is an easy way to make images open in Lightbox instead of ugly attachment pages
- A good guide to overlaying type on images from CSS Tricks. It doesn’t mention the CSS box-shadow property though, which is quite handy for spacing things out.
- Nicolas Gallagher’s guide to creating speech bubbles with pure CSS, which I used on my testimonials page.
If you’re planning to build your own WordPress theme, feel free to get in touch and I’ll try to help.
Enjoy the new site.
Image credit: pennylessz28 on DeviantArt
