You must be able to demonstrate a high level of knowledge of WordPress as a fully fledged CMS and be familiar with all aspects of a WordPress. We will require past projects and work to substantiate your position as a skilled ddevloper in this field.

Other useful skills include knowledge of Fireworks or Photoshop and an active knowledge of jQuery.

Ability to work under fixed timelines.

Initially work would be conducted on a Freelance basis.

Apply to Glenn on jobs@slickmedia.co.uk

City Opticians full E-Commerce Store

This is our second and latest web site for City Opticians and this time we wen’t all out with a full E-Commerce store. It boasts a fully fledged Content Management System (CMS) which allows City Opticians to manage all the content of the site, sliders, testimonials, news and products which are accessible full a full E-Commerce system.

This online store has a highly adaptable interface and includes extended products sale items, variations, multiple product images, related products and quick checkout (and much more). The system is fully integrated with secure payments which are processed via SagePay.

Tehnology

• E-Commerce
• WordPress
• Html
• CSS
• Php/MySQL
• CMS
• Javascript
• SEO

Branding by Garden – UK, UAE and International Branding Agency

Branding by Garden is the very exciting new Branding Agency that becomes the mother to the existing and very successful branding agency RF Branding. With offices in the UK and the UAE RF Branding already boasts an exceptional client list. With the launch of the new Brand ‘Branding by Garden’ the company will be hitting new levels in 2012.

Here at Slick Media we have a long standing relationship with this agency and were thrilled to continue this with the build of the client’s new web site for their own new brand ‘Branding by Garden’. One great thing about this business interaction is that both companies are always striving to push the envelope of what is possible and with this site we tried (and succeeded) a whole host of things that had either never been done before, or certainly not in the way that we did it. Indeed this site pushes the limits of WordPress to new levels with a highly advanced and fully loaded CMS and tons of cutting edge jQuery techniques to create an immersive and conceptional unique site.

Technology

• CMS on WordPress
• Full Size Image Galleries
• Unique Scrolling Galleries
• Advanced screen positioned elements
• XHTML
• CSS
• Php/MySQL
• jQuery

jQuery LocalScroll & jQuery ScrollTo

We aren’t going to go into loads of detail on the scroll as it’s covered fully here:-

http://flesler.blogspot.com/2007/10/jquerylocalscroll-10.html

Basically with this excellent jQuery script you can scroll any element on a page or within a div. We like the ability to scroll the body as it performs our anchor text replacement beautifully. However if you are new to jQuery you’ll probably find the instructions on the project page rather complicated and so we’ve got together a demo which you can use as the basis of your projects. It gives examples of how you can scroll body content with a jQuery anchor div and also how to scroll across content within a specific div.

Click for Demo

The mobile web is growing at a phenomenal pace, and is forecast to overtake the desktop web in 2014. In other words, more users will access the Internet using a mobile phone rather than a PC for the first time.

Approximately 900 million people currently access the web with mobile phones, compared to 1.4 billion desktop Internet users. In 2014, mobile web users will outpace desktop users (approximately 1.7 billion mobile users to approximately 1.65 billion desktop users). By 2015, the number of mobile web users is expected to grow to 2 billion.

Assuming an annual growth rate of about 2 percent annually between 2010 and 2015 in cell phone subscriptions (77 percent of the world’s population will have cell phone subscriptions in 2010 and 87 percent will have subscriptions in 2015), about 6.35 billion people worldwide will have a mobile phone subscription and approximately 1 out of 3 subscribers(or 2 billion out of 6.35 billion) will be accessing the Internet on mobile phones. (Source: Wikimedia)

And according to the August, 2011 edition of eMarketer, 33 percent of mobile users are looking to access local content relevant to their GPS positioned location.

Is Your Website Ready?

So, what does all of this mean to you? It means more people than ever will be viewing your website through a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer, via a wireless network. It also means that if you want to survive and thrive, you have to adjust and adapt, and make your website mobile web friendly. The good news is, it’s easier than you think.

“Within the Alexa top 1,000 sites, 40.1 percent of all sites are mobile-friendly. These sites represent the world’s most popular web properties, like Google, Facebook and Yahoo!

Beyond the top 1,000, mobile friendliness still holds strong but is not yet as widespread. Of the top 10,000 Alexa sites, 29.7 percent perform well on mobiles. Once the input data is broadened to include the top 500,000 sites, the total number of mobile-friendly sites drops to 19.3 percent.” (Source: mobiThinking.com)

If you haven’t already done so, the very first thing you need to do is bring your website up to speed visually. In other words, you want to make sure that users of mobile devices can view your site optimally.

The quickest and easiest way to do this is to run your site through the MobiReady online testing site. This is a free service that evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards.

The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device. There are also other tools that will allow you to test your site for mobile readiness. In fact, here are 10 Excellent Tools for Testing Your Site on Mobile Devices.

Personally, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of these types of testing tools. For example, I ran my site through MobiReady, and it gave my site a 2 out of 5 score which, according to their analysis is bad. I got the exact same score before and after I mobil-optimized my site.

Here’s the problem: I’ve had many friends and colleagues of mine, all with different makes and models of smartphones, on a variety of platforms, tell me that my site looks just fine on their phones. So while testing tools may be a useful resource, the true litmus test is what users of mobile devices are seeing – so be sure to ask them.

That being said, there ARE things you can do to mobile-optimize your website.

How To Make Your Website Mobile Compatible

1. Have a fast-loading site. Chances are, most mobile-web users who are using their phones to access the Internet are using a slower 3G connection. You can help these users out by making sure your website code is clean, which will not only make for a faster-loading site, but faster downloads as well.

2. Don’t use flash. Not all mobile devices can see flash? Personally, I’m not a huge fan of flash sites anyway. But if you absolutely, positively have to have a flash site, be both smart and considerate. Make sure you have an alternate HTML version of your site as well.

3. Have a clean, easy to navigate website. Remember, mobile users are viewing your site on a tiny little screen. In addition, there is no mouse and not all mobile devices are equipped with a touch screen. So don’t make it harder for mobile users to view or utilize your site than it needs to be. Clean up the clutter and streamline your content. Simplify, simplify, simplify. If you keep it simple, your site will be user-friendly for everybody.

4. Use HTML phone numbers. Don’t make mobile users have to type in your phone number. Use HTML so that they can simply click to dial the number.

5. Avoid horizontal scrolling. Mobile users prefer to scroll vertically as opposed to horizontally. It’s easier and less of a hassle for them. Always create your content as a single column of text that wraps for mobile users.

6. Use images sparingly. As I mentioned earlier, most mobile users are using a slower 3G connection. As a result, heavier images can take forever to load. To avoid this problem, you should use images sparingly on your website. But if you do choose to use images, they should be lighter-weight jpeg, gif or png format. Also, make sure to compress your images to avoid zooming.

7. Voice Search. Google’s Voice Search on smartphones, has increased voice search usage by approximately 600% in the past year. Since mobile devices don’t have a traditional keyboard like a PC or laptop, voice search makes searching quicker and easier for smartphone users. So you should definitely keep an eye on this trend for SEO purposes. Bear in mind, people tend to search differently when speaking as opposed to typing. For example, while you might type-search “best virtual assistants,” you might voice-search “what are the best virtual assistant services?” Again, it’s a trend you should keep an eye on.

From original article by: David Jackson

Pennypurr – The Home of British Shorthairs

Pennypurr are (as the title says) the Home of British Shorthair cats and are uniquely positioned to offer good homes for cute kittens and cats. Catkins Cattery is in turn the real life home for the Pennypurr cats and they are a long established client of Slick Media.

The new site is created on the WordPress platform and is fully loaded with jQuery and a very advanced range of admin options for the client to manage all aspects of the site, including multiple galleries and full control of the site’s custom theme. A very flexible solution.

Tehnology

• CMS on WordPress
• XHTML
• CSS
• Php/MySQL
• jQuery
• Logo Design
• Branding

Brand Driver International

Brand Driver are an International Research Agency specialising in qualitative and qualittative research for high level organisations.

Slick Media were initially tasked to build their original web site and recenently, due to a branding update, they required a freshened web presence. We wee able to use the existing CMS to completely updating the branding and style to create a site that would act as an effective interim solution prior to their complete web site revamp, which we also hope to be involved in.

Tehnology

• XHTML
• CSS
• Php/MySQL
• CMS
• jQuery
• Javascript

Custom Post Post Types or Custom Posts are a great innovation in WordPress that extend the standard functionality of ‘posts’ beyond that of the normal blogging sphere to make WordPress more of a fully fledged Content Management System (CMS). For example in the past where you may have used a custom query (such as page of posts)  to filter posts by say a particular category you can now define a specific custom post, which will have its own menu item in the WordPress Dashboard like so:-

So with Custom Posts what we gain is a higher level of specific functionality for a certain ‘Post Type’ – in our example we have ‘Restaurants’ as our Custom Post Type.

What are Custom Post Types Used For?

As above Custom Post Types are very useful where you want to separate off the normal post functionality of your WordPress Blog and make it a full CMS. Custom Post Types are often used for the following forms of functionality:-

• Portfolios
• Directory Listings
• News Items (as opposed to Blog items)
• Lists
• Custom Systems

We use Custom Post Types extensively in WordPress to give our clients much greater functionality and control of their site(s) content.

How are Custom Post Types Added to WordPress?

Custom Post Types are typically added directly to the function.php file of your WordPress theme and using our example of Restaurants this would be added as so:-

Custom Post Type Example (Restaurants)

// registration code for restaurants post type
	function register_restaurants_posttype() {
		$labels = array(
			'name' 				=> _x( 'restaurants', 'post type general name' ),
			'singular_name'		=> _x( 'restaurant', 'post type singular name' ),
			'add_new' 			=> _x( 'Add New', 'restaurant'),
			'add_new_item' 		=> __( 'Add New restaurant '),
			'edit_item' 		=> __( 'Edit restaurant '),
			'new_item' 			=> __( 'New restaurant '),
			'view_item' 		=> __( 'View restaurant '),
			'search_items' 		=> __( 'Search restaurants '),
			'not_found' 		=>  __( 'No restaurant found' ),
			'not_found_in_trash'=> __( 'No restaurants found in Trash' ),
			'parent_item_colon' => ''
		);

		$taxonomies = array();

		$supports = array('title','editor','author','thumbnail','excerpt','custom-fields','comments','revisions');

		$post_type_args = array(
			'labels' 			=> $labels,
			'singular_label' 	=> __('restaurant'),
			'public' 			=> true,
			'show_ui' 			=> true,
			'publicly_queryable'=> true,
			'query_var'			=> true,
			'capability_type' 	=> 'post',
			'has_archive' 		=> true,
			'hierarchical' 		=> false,
			'rewrite' 			=> array('slug' => 'restaurants', 'with_front' => false ),
			'supports' 			=> $supports,
			'menu_position' 	=> 5,
			'menu_icon' 		=> 'http://www.slickmedia.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/easy-content-types/includes/images/icon.png',
			'taxonomies'		=> $taxonomies
		 );
		 register_post_type('restaurants',$post_type_args);
	}
	add_action('init', 'register_restaurants_posttype');

Taxonomies (To split Restaurants by ‘Location’)

// registration code for locations taxonomy
function register_locations_tax() {
	$labels = array(
		'name' 					=> _x( 'Locations', 'taxonomy general name' ),
		'singular_name' 		=> _x( 'Location', 'taxonomy singular name' ),
		'add_new' 				=> _x( 'Add New Location', 'Location'),
		'add_new_item' 			=> __( 'Add New Location' ),
		'edit_item' 			=> __( 'Edit Location' ),
		'new_item' 				=> __( 'New Location' ),
		'view_item' 			=> __( 'View Location' ),
		'search_items' 			=> __( 'Search Locations' ),
		'not_found' 			=> __( 'No Location found' ),
		'not_found_in_trash' 	=> __( 'No Location found in Trash' ),
	);

	$pages = array('restaurants');

	$args = array(
		'labels' 			=> $labels,
		'singular_label' 	=> __('Location'),
		'public' 			=> true,
		'show_ui' 			=> true,
		'hierarchical' 		=> false,
		'show_tagcloud' 	=> false,
		'show_in_nav_menus' => true,
		'rewrite' 			=> array('slug' => 'locations'),
	 );
	register_taxonomy('locations', $pages, $args);
}
add_action('init', 'register_locations_tax');

Plugins that create Custom Posts Types in WordPress

If you are new to Custom Post Types and are looking for software/a plugin to add Custom Post Types to your WordPress Site then we recommend one of two plugins. Don’t waste your time looking for alternatives and choose on of the below.

1. Custom Press by WPMUdev

This is a great premium plugin covering all the bases including the creation of Custom Post Types, Taxonomies and Meta Boxes and these are all handled within a single tabbed admin area:-

This plugin is quick and simp to use and can be purchases on its own for a very reasonable $17 or alternatively you can signup to WPMUdev and get a whole host of other great plugins, great support and regular updates.

Get the plugin from WPMUdev and/or benefit form loads of other great Premium WordPress plugins

Easy Content Types for WordPress by Pippin Williamson on code canyon.net

This is a very comprehensive plugin that also caters to Custom Post Types, Taxonomies and Meta Boxes and is justifiably a best selling item on code canyon.net. The plugin is created by the author Pippin Williamson and he is a very well established premium WordPress plugin author offering a range of other plugins also on CodeCanyon. This one is the most popular and intuitively breaks down the process of creating advanced Custom Posts:-

What makes this Plugin a stand-out Custom Post Type plugin is the ability to export not only the Post Types, but also the related Taxonomies and Metaboxes. This makes embedding the Custom Post Types directly to your theme as simple as cut and paste.

Pippin provides great support for the plugin and also regular updates to codecanyon.net.

Get the plugin from code canyon.net and browse loads of other great premium plugins to enhance your WordPress site

• http://www.get-licensed.co.uk

Get Licensed

Get Licensed are the leading SIA License provision company in the UK and having a good web presence is an important aspect of keeping this position.Whilst Slick Media are primarily experts in highly customised Word Press web sites we are also able to help clients with high level bespoke sites to active their design goals.

We have worked with Get Licensed on building critical design aspects into the existing site structure, including a custom jQuery feature slider and all the other critical jQuery effects and graphics to bring the site in line with the high level corporate branding. We will continue to work with Get Licensed to further improve and streamline their current site.

Tehnology

• XHTML

• CSS

• Php/MySQL

• CMS

• jQuery

• Branding