This weekend I have lived the programmer lifestyle: alongside planning and running my son’s 3rd birthday party, I’ve completely redone my company website. It wasn’t quite as easy as picking a new WordPress theme and installing it, though. Oh no. I picked a custom professional theme, but then implementing it brought me into the world of custom post types, custom page templates, custom menus, shortcodes, plugins, widget logic… OH MY HEAVENS. I figure I’ve put in about 24 hours of time working on the website, and it’s still not perfect the way I want it. But it’s close.

A short laundry list of the things I’ve been working through:

• Set up Advanced Events Registration plugin, and then hacked it like crazy to make it Canadian (it was all states and zipcodes) and include an attendee’s company name in their registration. Sure I could have paid for the pro version, but still had no reassurance it would do what I wanted, so I just dove into the code and rewrote the event registration form, the way it listed attendees, the way it presented a list of events in a category. Still to do: change how it shows upcoming events in the sidebar widget.
• Created various custom post types to try to get testimonials and featured projects to show the way I want them to.
• Re-installed Download Manager to handle my premium content (easy!)
• Installed Pie-Register and configured it to accept more fields on the user registration form.
• Changed my newsletter hosting over to MailChimp because of the availability of scripts to automate subscriptions
• Moved this whole site from the working directory where I was testing and working all weekend, to the main directis.ca site where you see it now. Boy was that nervewracking!

There is much more I want to do with the site, and tell you about in terms of why I’ve done all these changes and what’s coming in the future. However it’s now 11pm and I have to rise at 5am for rowing practice tomorrow.