Last year’s event was the first WordCamp I’d ever been to actually. There were some great speakers and I’ve stayed in touch with a lot of WordPress designers and developers in Portland since then. It’s been a great networking event and we hang out now and then.

Infact I got hooked on WordCamp and went to the one in Phoenix earlier this year and that rocked.

There’s a great WordPress community here in Portland, so if you live here and want to learn more about WordPress, sign up. Tickets will go on sale this Friday and they’ve sold out quickly every year. So, if you want to get into #wcpdx, get your ticket early.

Official WordCamp 2011 Portland web site.

Merging your blog and web site

Before contacting Groves Design, Anne McCranie, owner of Fluid Movement + Massage in Portland, had been maintaining a blog on WordPress.com, as well as a separate web site on another server.  While the web site served as an excellent brochure site for the company, Anne was focusing all of her marketing energy on blogging, leveraging Facebook and email marketing.  The web site had not been updated in some time, so it was becoming increasingly important that the company have a single web-presence to eliminate client confusion and to make things easier for Anne to manage.

Using WordPress as a content management system (CMS), we created a brand new web site which functions just like a web site, but features her blog on the front page. It’s a one-stop-shop for her clients and makes it easier for them to get the information they need, while also staying up-to-date with the company’s news, hours, special offers, class schedules and more.

Branding WordPress for your company

There are a gazillion WordPress themes out there, but none of them look like your company’s brand, right?

For this project, I used the  iBlogPro theme, which looks like the image at right when you purchase it. As you can see, while the structure is the same, the color palette, images and other design elements are completely different from our finished product.

Using Fluid’s existing color palette and design elements, professional photography and a customized style sheet, we turned this theme into a web site that reflects the company’s brand. This is where a web designer/developer comes in. With design skills, knowledge of CSS and a little PHP, any WordPress theme can be changed to match your company’s brand.

After browsing around, I opted for WP Remix as it seemed to have the most flexibility in terms of layout options. It’s proven slower to get familiar with the theme than I’d hoped. Some of the layouts are pretty funky looking when you insert them into the editor window. I ended up pasting the HTML into Dreamweaver just to figure out where all of the divs are.

But, so far, I’m liking the theme. It does take some getting used to because there are so many templates to choose from. But once you’ve got it down, (well, when I get it down), I’m hoping the rest of the pages will flow.

The one thing I’m not seeing in here that I’d like is a full-width-page template. Right now, I’m having to mess with the HTML and a bit of the PHP to get the side bars to go away. Any way, back to the project and more on WP Remix later.

However, I’m already signed up for WordCamp Phoenix as I got hooked.

I’m really looking forward to trying out all of the new tricks I learned about at WordCamp and will post updates here as I work through them. Maybe it’ll help me finish my own darn website here. I’m already thinking about switching themes and junking a bunch of plugins.