Screenshot - Northern Pine Longboards 2.0
Last night I flipped the big heavy DNS switches and eagerly watched as the new Northern Pine Longboards site sprung to life amidst a flurry of sparks, lightning, and organ music.
End-User Features:
- Blog – The company definitely outgrew using Facebook alone for syndication awhile ago and what better solutions than a blog. The goal is role reversal. I don’t want the website to direct traffic to the Facebook page; I want the Facebook page to direct traffic to the website. In addition, using a blog for primary syndication makes collaboration with other businesses and people a lot easier.
- Products Browser – Users can now browse products in an intuitive “Amazonian” way. Among other things, products can now be filtered and navigated much like posts by clicking associated categories to view similar products. This should make itself more apparently useful once the company starts selling through the site.
- New Style – The presentation layer was restyled to be ultra-clean and sharp to build the ethos that will be necessary once I get the ecommerce portion implemented. The old style was suffocating at best, but I’m afraid I may have let my radical minimalism take over just a bit. Just compare it to the snapshot of the old version.
- Adorable Link icons!
Behind the Scenes:
- Massive SEO improvements.
- Microformatted pretty much everything I could with hentry, hproduct, and hcard where appropriate.
- Update Services – I added an absolutely fat list of update services that are notified of updates/posts.
- Custom permalink structure, which was probably the biggest headache of all.
- Database driven content. Since NPL’s catalog has expanded to include more than just longboards, a static product page really just doesn’t make sense anymore. The new products area is a fully dynamic database-driven system powered by WordPress 3.0′s new custom post types and custom taxonomies.
- Improved Admin UI – Since everything is database driven at this point, a good UI is absolutely critical to keep me from drowning in code.
- Shiny new hosting with Dreamhost. We were hosting through iPage, but recently their servers have gotten ridiculously laggy and I needed SSH support (which iPage doesn’t offer). Load time from my house in Eden Prairie has been cut down from over 3.5 seconds to less than 2!
- And probably 50 other things that were so traumatic to code that my subconscious has already repressed all memory of them.
As more things occur to me, I’ll update this post. Also, I’ll go into my techniques and the plugins I both used and modified in a later post.
Screenshot - Northern Pine Longboards 1.0
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