The new Waterside Day Spa site is out the door. The site was built using WordPress as the backend CMS with a custom theme developed by myself and designed by the talented Derek Ashauer of ashwebmedia.
Overall, I’m very pleased with how this one turned out. The site really captures the look they were going for.
I was able to tweak the templates in WordPress to give them the sidebar menus found on many of the pages without compromising their ability to manage the content in-house. It was surprisingly simple. I’ll try to do a write-up on the technique I used here.
Some sIFR was thrown in to keep pretty headline fonts throughout the site. I also used javascript image replacement where appropriate. I’ll be posting soon on why I like javascript over some of the other image replacement techniques out there.
By using image replacement, Waterside gets the best of both worlds. Most users visiting their site will see images in place of the text in the header and page menu. The images look better than plain text and are more appealing from a design standpoint. Underneath that, however, is plain text that is search engine optimized and accessible for users and browsers without images enabled (legacy browsers, cell phones, screen readers for those that are vision impaired, etc.).
