art

Moving an artist’s website onto WordPress

Last month, I migrated my brother-in-law’s sculpture web site Ronald Rae Sculpture onto the Power Blog Service. Ronnie is a famous sculptor who hand carves enormous granite sculptures. They are awesome.

We have kept the way the site looks pretty much the same as the old site as this was one of the attractions of the original site design. Using the Thesis theme makes it pretty easy to duplicate how the old site looked. We moved the menu across to the right hand side for SEO reasons and moved the telephone number to a more prominent location. Spot the differences below.

Lots More Traffic To The Site

However, what is different is that my sister, Ronnie’s marketing administrator, has the ability to update the site herself and also visitors can make comments, bookmark the site or tweet about the sculptures. And of course, now the platform is WordPress, we have syndication of content and pinging of blog directories.

The site now enjoys a tenfold increase in traffic over the original site and we have not even started taking any steps to promote the site or improve its SEO.

Innovations with Slideshows

The only real customization we needed was to handle slideshows of sculptures, which were previously created in flash. Each exhibition has it own slideshow of sculptures that are in that exhibition. There were also separate slideshows for ‘sculptures for sale’ and ‘sculptures in collections’. When sculptures are sold they move out of the exhibition and into a private collection and hence the slideshows are always having to be updated.

I wanted to create a mechanism where my sister could move sculptures between exhibitions herself using standard WordPress tools. We solved this challenge using tags, the D13Slideshow plugin and a few lines of custom code in the custom_functions.php file.

The D13Slideshow can be inserted into a post using a PHP call. What the code below does is display a slideshow of images for all posts, (excluding the current post) that have a specific tag.

function show_slideshow($slideshowtag) {
if (($slideshowtag)
&& ($postids = pbs_get_posts_by_tag($slideshowtag))
&& (count($postids) >0)) {
d13slideshow($postids);
}
}
function pbs_get_posts_by_tag($tag) {
$thispostid = get_the_ID();
$postids = array();
$posts = get_posts('numberposts=50&tag='.$tag);
foreach ($posts as $post) {
if ($post->ID != $thispostid ) {
$postids[] = $post->ID;
}
}
return $postids;
}

So for example show_slideshow(‘for-sale’) will display a slideshow of all sculptures that are tagged as ‘for sale’. If the Lion Of Scotland sculpture is sold, my sister only needs to remove the ‘for-sale’ tag and add the ‘collections’ tag to make the sculpture disappear from the ‘Sculptures For Sale’ slideshow and appear in the ‘Sculptures In Collections’ slideshow. Zero work for me and an immediate result for her.

When it is a blog not a blog?

This case study goes to show that with WordPress, Thesis and a few plugins you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by moving your site on a blogging platform such as WordPress even if your site is not a blog. WordPress is a really cost effective platform for building more visitors to your site and then starting a dialogue with them.

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