https://www.nialonehill.co.za

My sister, Laura Yates, recently opened a studio in Johannesburg. She has been a Nia instructor for a few years and was eager to set up her own teaching space. She asked me to build her a website to promote the new studio.

I got to work building a WordPress site using the Thematic Framework to streamline the process of building a custom theme.

The site’s header is an animated Flash banner. I used Illustrator to trace photos of people in various Nia positions before animating the images in Flash. I ran a simple conditional statement to ensure that the animation only runs on the home page, all other pages feature a static image of the traced movements. The same image is also set as a fallback for browsers that don’t have Flash installed.

To help Laura communicate with her Nia students and anyone with an interest in Nia, I set-up a phplist mailing list. I created a very simple html mailing template and used Jesse Heap’s PHPlist plugin to add a sign-up widget to the site.

The photo gallery is powered by the NextGen Gallery plugin, making it easy for Laura to upload and manage photos herself.

Social sharing is encouraged throughout the site with AddThis powering a Facebook like button and sharing features on every page.

I turned to Google Calendar to power the studio diary and upcoming events. I used Google Calendar Events to sync a calendar with the upcoming events module. Two calendars are combined and embedded in the class schedule and upcoming events page.

Nialonehill.co.za benefits from a number of useful WordPress plugins working behind the scenes.
All in One SEO Pack
Slimbox
Dynamic Widgets
Google XML Sitemaps
Asynchronous Google Analytics for WordPress
Redirect All Types
WP CSS

The combination of WordPress, the Thematic framework and useful plugins meant I could quickly deliver an effective website with all the tools needed for my client to maintain her website and add content without my help.