A new wordpress site we’ve architect-ed has just gone live – Flashbak.com
It’s a WordPress site, designed to show off pictures from “the old times”.
While we weren’t responsible for creating the design (so can’t claim credit for it) we did implement the design in WordPress – creating the wordpress theme and appropriate plugins to support the content.
On a desktop / wider browser windows, we show larger pictures and more information
On lower resolution screens the design moves to a single column layout with vertical scroll.
Bits of interest :
- The site was initialised with posts from an existing site – so we needed to carry across social media reputation/counts/comments to the new domain/site – so migration of selected content from one WordPress instance to another.
- All content is indexed by Solr – which we use to quickly populate the various category pages (like 1930s etc) and general search. Technically the “Decade” categorisation is just done by looking for tags like 193* on a post. Testing showed WordPress itself (via MySQL) wouldn’t be quick enough to support this.
- The site is responsive – it’s layout changes to move towards a single colum stack as you move to smaller page widths. Helping ensure that it’s viewable on mobile devices – and also for the pictures to look good on larger resolutions.
- We use a html5ish <picture> tag – which allows for higher quality images to be loaded on devices capable of higher resolution, while hopefully saving bandwidth for smaller resolution devices (which ought to be mobile, and therefore appreciate the bandwidth saving).