Texas Wax Website

Artist and web guru extraordinaire Haley Nagy and I have just completed the design of a new website and blog for all members and fans of Texas Wax, a regional encaustic painting society dedicated to promoting the ancient art of painting with wax.

Haley and I have been members of Texas Wax since the Austin group began in the spring of 2008.  Texas Wax is composed of active encaustic organizations in four Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.  As the four groups have grown and evolved over the past year+, we realized the groups had a need for a central website and blog to showcase all of our work, and to communicate with each other and with our fans.

Haley and I created the site in WordPress from a visual design that I created.  The underlying theme is based on the same theme I used for my fine art website and blog (a theme I created from bits and pieces of many other themes): Marilyn Fenn Studio.

The website features the usual stuff, but we also wanted to give all the artist members of Texas Wax the option of creating and updating their own profiles and gallery pages.  We modified the author page template with the help of several plug-ins (and some blood, sweat, and tears from yours truly), creating an artist directory that pulls their profile information into the author template/artist biography page. There’s also a link to their own gallery page.

We’ve included an events manager that will allow the regional chapter leaders to add events for their regions, and that will automatically move events from “Upcoming” to “Today’s Events” to “Archived” pages as the dates pass.  Featured on the sidebar are a dynamic Upcoming Events list and a rotating gallery of member artwork.

Member artists can add their voices to the blog and talk amongst themselves on a private member discussion list.

Fans of Texas Wax art and artists can sign up to receive blog posts as they are posted, and can sign up for mailing lists for the individual regions or for all of the chapters statewide.  We’ve also provided various contact forms.

Take a look at the brand-spanking new Texas Wax website, while we continue getting our artist members online (which is somewhat harder than herding cats!).

Creating your own theme in WordPress can be a bit challenging — more so if you’ve had no previous experience with WordPress, and very little experience or true understanding of PHP.

I think I could have had my beautiful new website completed in about 2-3 days if I hadn’t decided to try to create it in WordPress. It only took me a day to come up with the visual design, and less than a day to code it in XHTML and CSS, and my design and pages validated at that time for both HTML and CSS. Admittedly, this was probably a bass-ackwards approach, but I started with what I knew, figuring I would figure out the WordPress stuff later.

And mostly, I have. Well, not like I could rewrite much more PHP code than a tiny expression or two, but at least I get the way WordPress breaks up the whole content and style across various parts that come together when the page is called. The header, the index page (and it’s work-alikes, such as the the archive page, the “page” page, etc.), the sidebar(s), and the footer get assembled with an external css file when the page is called, and together — with any images and database content — make up the complete page that is displayed. Your website consists of no html files — it’s all php files that may have some css and some html included within, plus the css stylesheet(s), images, and some javascript files. The content primarily resides in a database.

But the tricky part is that divs may begin in one php file and end in another, and if your content, style and code are fairly complex, you can get lost, and leave out a crucial beginning or ending div from the proper file, and then all hell breaks loose, position-wise!

Then, of course, there are the browser issues.

And finally, in my case, I knew I wanted a very specific style of css gallery for my design portfolio images, and had created it even before designing the visual look of my new site — and it’s simple in a way, but complex in another.

More details forthcoming later today.

I’m pretty excited. I created my visual design on Sunday, coded it the regular way (CSS & XHTML) on Monday, started learning how to make it work with WordPress on Tuesday, and here, on Thursday, I have static and dynamic pages working together, and have worked out all the major bugs!

I still have a lot of little things that need adjusting, but this is my very first experience working with designing — or rather — redesigning in WordPress, so I’m pretty psyched that it’s not completely broken!