Colac IS is a one page WordPress site which uses the NextGen gallery, some jQuery Colorbox and jCarousel Lite to fit everything nicely into one brochure-like interactive page. The client originally wanted to put all that content on three pages but my idea was the one they went with in the end, a single page ‘content blast’ rather than three or four extremely light pages which no one would probably visit all that often anyway.

So here we are, a slightly complex one page site heavily optimised with W3 Total Cache and running two carousels and a Flash slideshow.

As usual I load the contact page and their catalogue link via Colorbox, an extremely versatile and good-looking jQuery modal window plugin which gives that extra impressive layer of content delivery that users expect these days.

This is probably one of the largest sites Zack Design has ever built. I created 4 plugins for it!

These include a data monitoring system which hooks into the Sunny WebBox, and downloads the latest results from solar installations connected to WordPress users and inserts the values in the database, a data graphing system which shows the monitoring results in graph format together with Fusion Charts and environmental data, a CoolIris plugin which shows a NextGen gallery album in a CoolIris slideshow, and an auto-login script which allows schools to connect to the portal automatically.

The website includes a forum (Simple:Press), and uses my WordPress CSS Dropdown Menu plugin for the tabbing system. It is also aggressively cached using the W3 Total Cache plugin. For PDFs I suggested my client use Issuu and Colorbox modal windows, which work extremely well together!

W3 Total Cache has been a massively useful tool which I’m installing on all large production sites these days. Using a combination of Firebug and the Google Page Speed plugin together with W3 Total Cache I’m able to dramatically increase the speed of page loads in WordPress. Just using the minification and CDN (or parallelisation options) that W3 Total Cache offers often increases a website’s Page Speed score by 10. Depending on its usefulness, I also implement page caching (though this can lead to problems with authentication so I’ve disabled it for Bright Future).

ThemeParkNewsDirect.com was a recently-created Drupal website I was commissioned to skin. One of my graphic artists created the graphics and I then proceeded to use the following Drupal modules:

• Chaos Tool Suite
• Panels
• The new Admin module for Drupal which mimics Drupal 7
• Image module (With the advanced ImageMagick module)
• Views
• Nice Menus – this required a significant amount of fluffing around with the CSS – I just wish there was a good Suckerfish module!

We ended up using the most complicated panel layout and many, many different kinds of views to get the right feel for the front page. The Zen starterkit for Drupal is also a magnificent way to start off a theme, but I’ve often found that one of the biggest problems with Drupal theming is that you have to start with the Drupal ids and classes rather than your own otherwise there’s so much more work involved.

Still, I think you’ll agree that the end result is quite good!