Three Way Builders Ltd. had an existing website with live on the job site web cams, many project pages with photos and a current projects listing in the sidebar. The site was maintained primarily by an on-staff engineer and it took about 4 hours to update a single project page.
Visions Encoded Inc. was asked to make this website easier to update. We accomplished this by converting the existing site to a content management system (CMS) while maintaining existing design. We used WordPress as a CMS and developed a custom theme for WordPress. Another thing the client was looking for was an easier way to manage all the photos for projects and a better user experience when looking at photos on the project pages. We solved this challenge by using several WordPress plugins co-operatively and writing some custom code to make this all work together. A side benefit of some of the custom coding was a search feature which auto-generates thumbnail images (reducing the need to create these manually each time, try a search).
For search engine optimization (SEO), we added a plugin to automate metadata creation, as well as automatically notify popular search engines when the website gets updated. Also, we re-directed the old site URL's to the new site search-engine friendly URL equivalent.
The end result is a searchable site which can be maintained simply by logging in with a web browser and editing the site much like using MS Word to edit a document.
