I was hav­ing trou­ble find­ing the right Word­Press plu­gin for a clients web­site … so I pro­grammed it!  You can see the results of the Related Links Blender plu­gin at the bot­tom of this post.  The plu­gin is a sim­ple but effec­tive way to keep vis­i­tors brows­ing your blog.  Sim­i­lar plu­g­ins existed, but none did exactly what I wanted.  Pro­gram­ming the plu­gin was an inter­est­ing exer­cise — always be learning!

Plugin features:

• Choose which posts to link
• Just add the post ID of the tar­get you wish to link
• Links include thumb, title, and brief intro­duc­tory text — automatically!
• Links can be struc­tured and styled to suite your website

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Another assign­ment for Cre­at­ing Excel­lence, small busi­ness mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ist.  Cor­ner Equip­ment needed a web­site that vis­i­tors could nav­i­gate quickly, that was easy to main­tain, and that search engines would pick up and list.  Because of the clien­t’s expe­ri­ence with Word­Press there was no ques­tion it would be our plat­form of choice.  Word­press is the most straight­for­ward CMS (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem) avail­able, and because it is enjoy­ing recent pop­u­lar­ity there is no short­age of exten­sions  and support.

Blender cre­ated a cus­tom theme based on Cre­at­ing Excel­lence’s design.  Care­ful atten­tion was taken to ensure the web­site gen­er­ated would be friendly to search engines.  An SEO strat­egy was part of the early design process.

One inter­est­ing fea­ture of the Cor­ner Equip­ment web­site is the pro­cess­ing of images attached to items in the inven­tory.  Pic­tures are uploaded by the site owner and auto­mat­i­cally resized for dif­fer­ent pur­poses, lit­tle or no out­side pre­pro­cess­ing required.

Visit Cor­ner Equipment

Blender has expanded its web­site to include a (we)blog.  The blog will act a plat­form from which Blender will share news and infor­ma­tion with vis­i­tors, to Face­book, and to Twit­ter.  Posts top­ics will include web­site launches and hi-lights, Blender Design news, and gen­eral web design indus­try news and information.

Built on the Word­Press blog­ging and con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS),  Blender designed a cus­tom tem­plate based on the blender web­site so that the blog would mesh seam­lessly with our exist­ing content.

The blog also serves as a tech­nol­ogy demon­stra­tion to show clients how Word­Press can be inte­grated into a website.