I recently had the pleasure of redesigning the website for a local artist, David Carr. The original site was something that I had done about 2 and a half years ago, so it was due for an overhaul.

Once again I used Wordpress to run the entire site, with the help of a few plugins.

• Plugins
• • NextGen Gallery
  • WP e-Commerce
  • GigPress
  • MailChimp
  • cforms

We were originally going to just add a store to the existing site, but decided to redo the entire thing. The site is a complete overhaul from the ground up. We kept with the paper feel of the first site, but gave it a much more textured and natural look.

The design takes advantage of some new CSS elements, but not all browsers support them. One that I used a lot was text-shadow, but currently Firefox 3.5+, Safari 1.1+ and Opera 9.5+ are the only browsers that support it. One that I used less frequently, but really helped to blend in some of the images is opacity. Using this I lowered the opacity on some of the images, so that the background behind certain images is able to show through.

Logo

Dave also came up with a new logo, which I took and blended in with the paper. I wanted the logo to have a burnt in look and I think it came out really well.

Shows

Even though the gigpress plugin is designed for bands; we are using it to manage various art shows and other appearances that Dave will be making. In addition the plugin features widget support, which allowed me to easily add the dates to the front page. This is the same plugin that I used on the breaking benjamin website.

Store

As I had mentioned previously, the main priority of the site is the store. From the store Dave is able to sell both his original paintings and prints of them. I chose WP e-Commerce to handle the store. I did have to hack some of the code to get the plugin to act how I wanted, but other than that the plugin was fairly easy to deal with.

Comments

Probably one of my favorite design elements of the new site are the comments. The comments are designed to have the look of an old notecard. They also take advantage of gravatars for the commentator’s icon.

Screenshots

Here are a few more screen shots of the site.

Don’t forget to visit artmonkeyworld.com and please let me know what you think.