My WordPress (Blog and CMS) Website – Feedback Appreciated

  • Craig Watson

    (@craigwatson)


    14 years, 1 month ago

    Well, here is my website, almost entirely using WordPress 🙂

    The theme has been slightly customised from Pyrmont V2, which is a really nice, clean, dark theme I found while Google’ing.

    I’m using WordPress for the main website content (pages) and also my blog posts, in combination with a fair few plug-ins (Wordbook for Facebook cross-posting, Last.FM for scrobbling, Lightbox v2 and more).

    Any helpful (constructive) feedback and/or criticism is appreciated – as are RSS subscriptions and general blog comments 🙂

    The gallery is using Coppermine, it’s legacy from when I had the site in hand-coded XHTML, but I want to keep the image filestructure, so short of writing some complex .htaccess rewrites, I have no option but to keep it 🙂

    Cheers,
    Craig

    // Edit – would be nice to give the URL!! http://www.cwatson.org 🙂

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Thread Starter Craig Watson

    (@craigwatson)

    14 years, 1 month ago

    Anyone? 🙂

    armstead

    (@armstead)

    14 years, 1 month ago

    Looks good and seems to be a lot inn there, but a couple of thoughts.

    Your header is a little overwhelming in size. You might shrink it up somehow.

    Also, your galleries look like they are Coppermine. The problem with that kind of gallery is that they tend to be bigger than the screen, which causes things to jump around visually and make it hard to see the full picture…If you have time, you might want to set up Lightbox style galleries instead.

    Thread Starter Craig Watson

    (@craigwatson)

    14 years, 1 month ago

    armstead: Thanks for the comments, I’ll look into slimming the header down a bit.

    As I said in my original post, I ideally want to keep the file structure of my gallery the same (I have hotlinked photos from it all over the place, including intermediate copies created by Coppermine), so I can’t really get rid of it – unless someone knows of an extremely customisable gallery application that uses Lightbox?

    armstead

    (@armstead)

    14 years, 1 month ago

    About the hotlinking — if you mean you have placed links to the photos in your blog on other sites, I think you could leave those where they are, and still make new lightbox galleries with the images for your blog. You might check out NextGen Gallry plug in and plkay with that. It seems pretty flexible and fast to make Lightbox galleries with.

    Thread Starter Craig Watson

    (@craigwatson)

    14 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks for the idea, I’ll definitely look into it. I guess I could keep the old versions of the photos online in the old structure and just wipe the Coppermine files and database.

    I have played with NextGen at some point (a freelance client’s website uses it) but I’ll give it another look when I don’t have as much university work outstanding!

    Thread Starter Craig Watson

    (@craigwatson)

    14 years ago

    After playing with NextGen, it feels incredibly bloated and hard to use; it’s like using a sledge-hammer to nail in a picture-hook.

    WordPress is first and foremost a blog application, so I guess trying to extend it to galleries is always going to be doomed to some sense of failure.

    What I might try and do is make Coppermine more WordPress-like and use some SEO and Lightbox plugins (if they exist).

    If anyone had any other suggestions, they’re by all means welcome.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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