The site is pretty straight forward except that she needed a way to compile her own lists of establishments and wanted to be able to sort them her own way.  What I ended up doing was coding an add-on for WordPress that gave her access to her own database so she could do what she wanted to do.  Pretty slick.  It finds latitude and longitude of an address as she’s inputting it so it can show up on the map in just the right spot.  It also allows her to place paid ads throughout the site in specific ways so it doesn’t lose its local feel.  Oftentimes ads stick out like a sore thumb, but I think she’s done a great job keeping the design clean and easy to follow.

So, if you’re planning a trip to the Seattle area, check out the Puget Sound Platter.  There’s a lot of good food up there.  You just need to know where to find it.

I gave them a couple cool features.  The most obvious in the picture above is that the whole website’s background is made up of a photo of the course.  Not just one photo though.  There are actually a number of photos that are grabbed randomly each time a user hits the site.  In other words, go to the site right now and maybe you’ll see a picture of #4 from the tees.  Go back tomorrow and you might see the clubhouse from 18′s green.  ”Why not make a new picture come up every time I visit a page” you say?  Well, that would just be silly.  Those pictures are kind of big, so I only want you to have to download one each time you visit the site.  Otherwise page load times could be pretty long if you’re on a slow internet connection.  I know.  ”Nice job Matt.  You really think of everything, don’t you?”  Yeah.  I try.  That’s what makes me worth what I bill. :)

Another thing you might notice is that the majority of the site is semi-transparent so you can see the background. Why would you want to cover up those awesome backgrounds and not even be able to see them?

They are also able to post PDFs of menus, tournament pairings and results to the website that end up embedded in the website rather than opening in a big, ugly window in your browser or downloading so you have to try to find it in the sea of icons all over your desktop.  There is also a calendar of events, a tour of each hole and a blog so they can keep everyone up to date on what’s happening in the restaurant, frost closures in the winter or whatever happens at a country club that they want people to know about.

Fun site.  Great course.  Nifty pool for the kids.

You don’t have to tell me.  ”Why don’t they just take payment online?”  I know.  We’re talking old guys here though (the buyers, not Bill).  They often don’t trust that new fangled interweb thing and that PayPal is just out to get you.  Anyway, no online payments.  Just simple, cool order forms that let you track who printed first.

What you’re seeing above is the listing details page for one of Janet’s listings.  I’ll tell you about a few of the cooler features of the site.

• At the top, you’ll see “About the Company”, “Local Events”, and “Local Info / Links”.  All three of those pages are self managed by Integrity.  They have an administrative back end (custom built by me) that they log into to add or edit content for those pages.
• The photo at the top right of the stream is actually a photo slideshow.  They can place any number of photos in the slideshow and each time a page loads the slideshow grabs a number of them and starts displaying them with a nice fade in/fade out transition.  I limited the number of slides so that the page didn’t take forever to load.  More pictures = more time to download.  As it is, the page loads quickly, but you get a seemingly random slideshow each time.  Pretty cool.
• The menus are actually what is known as a Mega-Menu.  Most of the links are pretty normal, but if you roll over “Meet The Team” you see a dynamically generated grid of brokers.  The list is created from the database which, you guessed it, Integrity has full control over.  They add/edit/remove brokers on the fly.  Each broker profile has space for a photo, contact information, social networking links and all the normal stuff.  The broker profile page also shows each broker’s listings and, at some point, will also show blog posts for that particular broker.
• The blog.  Ok.  Janet knows that the real value to a real estate broker is the knowledge in their head.  She wanted to be able to share that knowledge as well as boost her Google ranking, so we integrated a custom WordPress blog with the same design as her website.  The benefit to having it all together is that I can grab posts from a given category, tag or author and display them anywhere I like on the website.  Hence the statement above about showing blog posts on broker profile pages.  It’ll be super cool once the brokers really start posting.
• The slideshow of photos is pretty cool.  Nothing overly special that you don’t see every day, but the thumbnails are squared off and outlined and move along with the main photo.  Oh, and the buttons are styled to match the rest of the site.  Nice, but not rocket science.
• The listing data is obviously pulled automatically from the RMLS using my IDX feed.  No rocket science there either.  If you have a real estate website and you’re not utilizing some form of IDX you should really pull your head out of the sand and join the 20th century.
• The map.  This is totally cool.  On the left you see a list of 10 listings of similar price and size (beds/baths/sqft) within a predefined radius. As you hover over the entries on the left, the photo and listing info on the right change as does the map.

So, lots of cool features.  All custom coded and pieced together to fit Janet’s vision of what she wanted a website to be.  I can do the same thing for you.  Just give me a call and we can talk.

Everything that’s important is one click away no matter where you are on the site.  The design is so versatile that he has even had me create most of his print ads to the magazine’s specs using the same general template.  That way, when someone sees and ad, they follow the link to his website and everything looks familiar.  It’s the latest trend.  Consistency in advertising materials.  Novel concept, I know.  :)

Going off his business card and a tri-fold pamphlet I was able to customize a WordPress theme to fit his needs and style.  Subtle blues and grays, his logo, a classy font…  He also has the ability to add pages, post tips for his clients and edit everything down to the size and color of text.

Oh, and 3 weeks after launching he showed up on the first page in Google.  Pretty impressive considering all we did was move his old content over to a fresh design.  Google obviously LOVES WordPress.  I think I do too.  What can I say?  I’m a fan. :)

Once he got the “do crazy stuff with my website” bug, he had me add a custom blog that he uses to showcase shoots and let people download low resolution versions of their photos for use on sites like Facebook, add a music player that let him choose specific music based on the page, add a full blown photo gallery that lets him upload as many photos as he likes (I think there are a couple thousand as of today) and a way to upload tips and coupons to go with specific photo galleries.  Very fun site.  Gary really knows how to test my creativity in coding.

The end result included a blog they updated a couple times a week, a newsletter plugin that let them send out HTML newsletters to their fan base of a thousand, or so, people and links back to pages on the original Flash-based site.