New website live

As of 3:16AM on July 8, the new Black Lotus website is live.

That’s right, I was so excited about finishing it that I went ahead and pulled an all nighter. I think it really paid off! I’ll go ahead and walk you through some of the features.

Home Page
The home page (and every page in the site) is fully content-managed which means we can make simple text changes or even fairly complex image changes all from a Wordpress backend. This is a great value to customers because without a CMS system, they would be calling their web design company constantly which can get to be quite expensive.

The home page also features recent posts from our blog (which was a simple wordpress plugin) and NexGen gallery which has an impressive “lightbox” function to show off our latest work. Go ahead, check it out!

About Us
Not much to say here, though it is another content-managed page. Can you see John’s wife in the picture I had to crop him out of?

Folio
This page has the most “ooh” and “aah.” It features Tiltviewer which is a free program for wordpress and I think it’s rather snazzy. It’s pretty simple on our end to upload new pictures and project details and have them instantly shown in our portfolio. For some, it’s almost like a video game! You can use the arrows to navigate and hit “f” to flip the card and see project details. Very cool.

Services
This is where people find out that there is a charge for awesomeness and attractiveness (lame Kung Fu Panda reference).

Contacts
This page is special because of the contact form. It’s a true AJAX form (Thanks Contact Form 7 plugin) which means that if you mess it up, it doesn’t have to wait for the server to validate (go ahead, try leaving your name blank and submitting!) very cool. Of course, this is all stuff that we know how to do but the amazing thing about wordpress is that much of this work has already been done before.

Blog
You’re looking at it! The true capabilities of wordpress are in the blog engine. We hope that the content we write and the discussion we start about web design here will be a big source of traffic and business for our firm.

So there you have it! Have a look around, leave any comments, and by all means, pass it on to your friends and business associates!

Dallin