During my time with Montrose Travel, the home based agents division had contacted me upon hearing that I have experience working with WordPress websites. They wanted to revamp their old site and a series of landing pages, a blog as well as some custom forms built. I accepted the job which landed me the role of both designer and developer.

Concept Wireframes

Since we basically had to start from scratch, I fired up some Balsamiq mockups so I can present to the client what the site structure and layout can become. Since WordPress has a pretty simple template system, all I really had to wireframe were the major pages such as home and blog pages.

The site had to be responsive, so this was also included in the mockup process. The design process alone took approximately two weeks to complete.

Custom Post Type – Testimonials

A requirement that the client had was an easy way to add their testimonials – instead of a static page that they had to keep appending to. The solution I had provided was a custom type called “Testimonials”.

This had allowed the admins to maintain this section of the site the same way they publish articles. Since they’re already familiar with posting with WordPress, learning this process was second nature to them.

The custom theme followed high coding standards, with valid HTML and CSS syntax. SEO was a big part of the client’s business, so a strict optimization report had to be done with the theme.

Custom Join Form

Another requirement was a multi-page form for travel agents who wish to join. This form was built within the theme system, but had posted information to a couple of back-end technologies. The form itself was also responsive, so users can join even from a mobile device.

This section was one of the more challenging part of the entire project. Not only that it has to look good, but also has to be security compliant, spam protected and data has to be validated and sanitized.

The Homepage

Finally, the homepage had to stand out. The images were all done in-house. With models from the working staff – even the photographer was one of them. A couple of photo shoots were done in a local park to produce some of the carousel shots.

Videos were also produced internally, along with the company news and articles imported from the old system. Testimonials in the homepage is a random feed of the custom post type discussed earlier.
The entire project took approximately 2-3 months to complete.