First built in 1967, the North Blackburn Shopping Centre has been serving the community of North Blackburn for 51 years. Originally known as Old Orchard Shopping Centre, the centre sits on what was once an orchard where a variety of fruits including cherries, pears, plums and quinces, were grown.
With the decision to give the centre a face lift to maintain their appeal for the next generation, new development plans were recently lodged which will see the centre incorporate an improved supermarket, upgrades to community services and a food and beverage entertainment precinct. Along with the new centre, it was also time to create a more modern and user friendly website, that not only showcases all the centres stores, but will be used to provide locals with constantly updated centre news along with any upcoming development plans.
The new North Blackburn Shopping Centre website was designed by the extremely talented Fiona Brand from Brand By Name. I was then tasked with bringing the new site to life by creating a custom responsive WordPress theme. With an emphasis on user-friendliness, the site not only loads super-fast, but looks great across desktops, smartphones and tablet devices.
SitePoint is a hub for web developers to share their passion for building incredible Internet things. Founded in 1999 and based in Melbourne (Australia), SitePoint is proud to support all manner of web professionals, from developers, designers, product creators through to entrepreneurs.
As part of their commitment to providing useful resources to the development community, Sitepoint were keen to provide a selection of WordPress themes. Before this could happen though, they wanted to develop a high quality base theme that they could use to build these themes. Not only would this provide them a great starting base for their themes, but would also provide some consistency among all the themes they were planning to release.
In designing & building the Base Theme for sitepoint, I focused on 6 major areas. This new base theme needed to be super fast. With a performance score of 98 on Pingdom, this was definitely achieved. It needed to be mobile friendly. Google gave it 100/100 on their Mobile Testing tool. It was important that this new theme was coded with WordPress best practices in mind, it needed to be easy to use and develop with and it was important that it be released under the GPL Open Source license. Last, but not least, with the growing number of eCommerce sites out there, it was important to make it compatible with the best WordPress eCommerce platform out there, WooCommerce.
Macmillan Education Australia is one of the leading educational publishers in Australia for Secondary English resources. Macmillan support students as they learn and develop their skills through workbooks and textbooks along with encouraging creativity and a love of literature with popular fiction, drama and poetry titles.
The previous Macmillan English site had a number of issues with how their titles were presented, and site visitors found it hard to find what they were looking for, especially when it came to newer titles. Macmillan needed a site that was easier to search as well as one that enabled titles to be catalogued more efficiently. They also wanted a membership site for teachers so that they could access further resources. Each Macmillan title has a special resource code printed inside the cover and when a teacher purchases one of the Macmillan titles, they can then use this code to access additional resources on the site, related to that title.
Macmillan Education Australia is one of the leading educational publishers in Australia for both Primary and Secondary resources. Voted the Primary Publisher of the Year at the Educational Publishing Awards for the past seven years in a row, Macmillan is dedicated to creating innovative, exciting and reliable educational resources for both teachers and students. Continue reading
The Easy WP Guide is an extremely popular WordPress manual. Written completely by myself, Anthony Hortin, it’s an easy to read WordPress manual that will guide you through the process of editing your site content. With the release of WordPress 4.0, I decided that it was time to refresh the look of the site along with making it responsive.
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