Headstart Hats is a online Hat Shop specialising in classic headwear for Ladies and Gents. Designed over a two month period this is an excellent example of what can be achieved using the Zen Cart e-commerce solution.
Several additional modules have been added to the basic Zen Cart install package including Google Base (Froogle) Feeder. The site also make use of a jQuery slider which displays a number of the sites products.
Although I have been designing web sites for some time now I have tended to avoid using content management systems due to a lack of coding knowledge. Having used Joomla! in the past and not really liking it very much I have been looking for a more user friendly alternative; something I could use for future clients web sites that would allow them to update their own site with relative ease.
I have been aware of WordPress for some time but never really looked at it until recently. I decided to give WordPress a go with the aim of recoding the standard template to look exactly like my current web site. With the exception of a few minor differences including the “proudly powered by WordPress” statement in the footer and the “register” and “log in” links at the top of the side bar I have been successful in recreating the exact look of the main Retro Edge Web Design site.
The WordPress installation you see here is a recoded version of the default installation (see image to the right). To get the WordPress default installation looking exactly like my main site I had to recode a number of files including header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php etc. etc. Due to the menu structure of the main site I stripped out most of the WordPress sidebar menus and widgets; which I can see would be useful for future projects but were not relevant for my current requirements. As well as wanting to test out the various features of WordPress I wanted to add a comments feature to my site so users could comment on blogs and articles.
If you are interested in using WordPress on your own site then check out the wordpress.org web site, the support forum is superb. Alternatively if you would like to enquire about having your web site designed using WordPress please contact me via the contact page.
