Site Launch: TobinSprings.com

This last weekend was pretty sad… I basically spent ALL weekend doing homework (with the exception of church on Sunday). However, I did take a few minutes on Sunday night to finalize Tobin’s site. So now tobinsprings.com is live. Exciting! :-)

Tobin wanted a site of his own to 1). Showcase his artwork 2. For his art classes at the University of Idaho (where he’s working toward a masters degree). So on his site, I built him a portfolio for his artwork and sketches, and a masters section. The Masters section is set up so that he can add subsequent classes and keep track of them easily.

As far as the back-end of the site goes… I used a combination of WordPress, ZenPhoto and a Flash plugin called SlideShowPro. SlideShowPro powers the slideshow on the homepage. That slideshow reads a dynamic xml document that is written from data pulled from the ZenPhoto database. Gotta love PHP. Nathan Smith of SonSpring.com blogged about the plugin on his site awhile ago, so when I wanted a nice slideshow, I decided to give SlideShowPro a shot. I’m happy with my purchase, and I think it looks great in Tobin’s site.

ZenPhoto runs Tobin’s portfolio. If you are looking for a simple, clean photo gallery solution – look no further than ZenPhoto. I have used it on a number of websites, and it’s great.

WordPress runs the rest of the site (Masters, About, etc.). I did a little magic here… Tobin’s Masters pages are all pages – not posts. But I wanted to structure this section using classes and assignments. I wanted to show an excerpt (including images) for each assignment on the class page. That’s not really built into WordPress… So I ended up figuring out the code to pull an excerpt for a page – including images. If you’re wanting to do something like that, contact me using the contact form.

I also tweaked the ZenPress WordPress plugin a bit so it inputs a specific-width for thumbnails – and they are linked to a larger image which opens using Lighbox. I’d already done this tweaking for my website, so this was a pretty quick change for his site.

So go ahead and jet over to tobinsprings.com and look it over. In the future we’d like to add a shopping cart to the site so you can purchase Tobin’s artwork. If something catches your eye now, you can contact me and we can work something out.

p.s.  Happy Halloween…  Too bad I’m sitting in class rather than hanging out with the Youth at Trunk or Treat!