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Kathleena Gorga

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – January 12, 2010

Site

www.kathleenagorga.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

Client. (The same client as for the Conscious Beauty site.)

Theme

Kathleena Gorga 1.0 (created by Sallie Goetsch with Artisteer)

Active Plugins

Notes

Kathleena wanted to duplicate the appearance of a site that had been created with a combination of PageMaker and Photoshop, but have the ability to add new photos to her galleries. Since I’m not primarily a theme designer (who am I kidding? I’m not a theme designer at all), this required a fair amount of tweaking, but the result is very close, with greater usability.

I used pageMash to hide the blog entirely more than for organizing the comparatively small number of pages.

The initial gallery page does involve a single table and a few absolute URLs—which tripped me up when it came time to  publish to the root directory. The actual galleries use Cleaner Gallery and Lightbox 2. Cleaner Gallery is wonderful for uploading whole directories of images at a time.

Author-izer

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – November 12, 2009

Site

www.author-izer.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

The Author-izer is Sallie’s other business.

Theme

screenshot

Authorizer2 by Sallie Goetsch, created with Artisteer

Active Plugins

November 12, 2009

Notes

The plugin that deserves honorable mention here is Redirection, because I installed it on my old authorizer.fileslinger.com site to redirect the original Author-izer blog to the new author-izer.com location. Depending on the kind of 404 messages I start to get from SEO Ultimate (I just switched from All in One SEO Pack), I may install it here, as well.

I did more than move the Author-izer site from a subdomain, however. I expanded the static pages from three to 26 (at last count). That makes a plugin for organizing pages absolutely critical. PageMash works wonderfully. It makes the back end of WordPress look a lot more like the mind map I used for my site redesign.

Another great tool for a large site is Dagon Design Sitemap Creator. Where Google XML Sitemap Creator builds sitemaps for search engines, Dagon Design builds them for humans. You insert one short code phrase into the HTML editor of your sitemap page, and it does all the rest.

I used Podcasting rather than PowerPress mostly because I had never tried it before. As a podcasting consultant, I thought I ought to know how the plugin worked, even though PowerPress is now the podcasting plugin of choice. It works, but I won’t be switching any of my other sites over to it.

Query Posts lets me show recent posts without including the posts that are just collections of Delicious bookmarks inserted by Postalicious. (It lets you do other things, too, but it’s very handy for excluding certain post categories.) While I think it’s useful to have those links collected in my blog, I don’t think they’re the items of most interest to visitors.

I may be taking the Collapsible Archive Widget out, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but just because the current thinking seems to be that including your archives takes up space you could use for something more interesting to your readers. (Also, a colleague told me that all those links to archive pages can slow down your page loading.) Expect to see some updates in the plugin list.

Dorataya

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – November 12, 2009

Site

www.dorataya.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

Client. (Okay, she’s my mom.)

Theme

Modularity Lite Screenshot

Modularity Lite by Thad Allender from Graph Paper Press

Active Plugins

Notes

Since my mother is a photographer, I wanted a portfolio-style theme for her site. And since she had already uploaded hundreds of photos to Picasa, I wanted her to be able to insert photos from her existing albums rather than having to upload them all over again.

Picasa Image Express takes care of inserting individual images from Picasa albums into posts, and it’s very easy for a non-geek to use. Shashin, on the other hand, is an impressively sophisticated tool, but the options are a bit overwhelming. It can, however, display all your Picasa albums in a WordPress page.

In addition to resizing a few of Mom’s panorama photos to fit the custom slideshow for Modularity Lite (one day I’ll have to see whether it’s possible to use more than 5 images for that), I chose a dark background for maximum drama and added the thumbnail excerpts because we wanted as many images to show as possible.

Finally, because Mom has so many Picasa friends from overseas, we needed a translator. The Global Translator plugin works well, though it can’t do what Picasa does and translate multiple languages into each other, since it’s designed to translate from the base language of the blog’s author into the language the blog reader chooses.

Conscious Beauty

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – November 12, 2009

Site

www.consciousbeauty.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

Client (The amazing Kathleena Gorga is Sallie’s stylist, if you were wondering where that red hair came from.)

Theme

screenshot

Conscious Beauty 2 (created by Sallie Goetsch with Artisteer)

Active Plugins

Notes

Converted from static site to WordPress in 2008 to make it easier for Kathleena to maintain and update her own site. The blog was secondary, but she’s starting to use it more. The Advanced Category Excluder plugin and a custom page template power the dynamic content in the Community page.

Looking at this list, I realize that I could simply have used text widgets to do what I used Quotes Collection and Random Image Widget for, since there’s exactly one image and one quote. I was new to widgets at the time, and the name “text widget” confused me. And since it ain’t broke…

I tested a number of gallery plugins on this site, and Kathleena and I preferred the effect of Lightbox 2. I know everyone loves NextGEN, but it creates multiple copies of everything and puts them in strange places.

As for the cache plugins, Conscious Beauty is hosted on GoDaddy, which is known to be a bit sluggish as a WordPress host. (I have some of my own sites there as well.)