This case study is a look into how I jumped in to develop a single-page WordPress site complete with custom styling in two weeks, launching within our tight timeline.
Predicting The Turn is a book recently released (date) by Dave Knox, Chief Marketing Officer of Rockfish Digital. As is common these days, this book release needed a website. Since Dave works for a great digital agency, he used those talents to quickly create a site to deliver information about his book to the public.
I came into this project as Creative was being wrapped up. Creative’s objective was to design a site that aligned with the brand of the book while utilizing the components of a well-built WordPress theme in an effort to minimize development time. While the design wasn’t directly tied to a specific theme, it was built using the typical modules you see in most WordPress sites today: stacking columns, full-width and centered everything.
Because the budget needed to be kept as low as possible, I decided against buying a specific theme. Instead, I used WordPress’ default Twenty Seventeen theme in conjunction with the Visual Composer plugin to easily layout the content per the design. Then I could create the global and custom styles in the Custom Styling feature of the theme.
The site itself is pretty simple. There are sections explaining what the book is about, where to buy it and gives users a little background information on author Dave Knox. The portion that had the most development time was the slider. I believe most slider plugins for WordPress are bloated and never give you the desired look you want. To mitigate this, I used Slick Slider. I added the necessary JavaScript and CSS files, jQuery and styling to create a slider that aligned with the creative and responded well across all devices. In Visual Composer, I used the raw HTML element to add the code for the unordered list code to create the slider.
Although this is a simple WordPress build, it showcases my ability to get up to speed on a project quickly. Once on-boarded, I assessed the situation quickly and created a development plan to align with creative, timeline and budget. From there, I moved immediately into development and established solid communication with the team.
