For anyone that knew me around the time I was putting together the 2014 Calgary Icebreaker site, you’d know that it was a pretty stressful time. I was developing a new site completely from scratch, with the intention of having the most user customizable site in the world.

Time constraints and learning curves soon put paid to that idea. A trip back to Melbourne for a wedding the day after making the site live didn’t help either. It was a pretty stressful time, but overall I was happy to have built a functioning site that could take Paypal donations AND have the ability to manually track and enter cash/cheque donations on our side. It’s not as simple as just copy-pasting some HTML for a donate button from the paypal website I soon learned.

Fast-forward 10 months, and we now have a completely redesigned calgaryicebreaker.com site. Live and functional nearly a whole 3 months before the event(!). Visually, it doesn’t look like much has changed, and that was my intention, but underneath the covers there’s a whole lot of new stuff going on, and one thing made it all possible: WordPress!

• If you’re registering for the event, you’ll notice we’ve streamlined the registration process and can now have you registered in a matter of seconds. [The former registration fee is now a recommended donation 🙂 ]
• Editing your user account is the main visual difference most Dipsters will notice, this is because it’s all handled by WordPress now, using the standard Edit Profile functionality. We have some custom fields added, and I would like to style this page a little more consistently with the rest of the site, but for now it’s good

Stay tuned for more of my thoughts on WordPress, in the meantime get on over to calgaryicebreaker.com and donate some hard earned, or register for the event. It’s a refreshing way to kick off the new year!