Mmm…Mattessons

Today is the day… Two fast (and sausages filled) weeks later and we’re ready for the launch of the new Mattessons website.

Our deadline for this project was determined by a new TV ad that’s coming out today and so the flexibility in timings was somewhat limited.

We decided to use Wordpress for this project which means this is also my first commercial project on the WAMP stack. The decision to go with Wordpress was based on a few different criteria, the first being…time.

Anyone who’s been working with Wordpress for any period of time will know how fast it can be to get a site up and running in no time at all. The time investment comes when you’re developing a complete custom template…enter Mattessons!

As the lead developer on the Mattessons project I had to make some calls as to what amount of content management we were going to be offering to our client. The more they were able to manage, the longer it’d take in the development process. My decisions mostly revolved around the idea of “Lets do what we can to give them control over all content items”.

We did this by employing some nice use of custom fields, the creation of a very basic custom markup language for inserting custom property values into page copy and by creating a system where pages themselves can be pulled into other pages and displayed as promos/previews.

You’ll notice on the homepage of the new website that there are currently two promos being displayed. These promos are pages in themselves, just as are the products in the Our Range section and the footer items.

Wordpress makes it really easy to get information about the current page and it’s child pages which enabled us to create a basic yet powerful hierarchy of products and product ranges. We’re also using a great plugin for relating pages to one another in a more lateral way. This again is being used in a slightly different way than standard by pulling out information on related pages and then obtaining those page details through the standard Wordpress API.

All-in-all this has been a really fun project to work on. It’s been fast paced with a quick turn around and it’s been a joy working with a talented team of managers, designers, QAs and front end developers.

What can I say… “It’s a Primal Thing”.