Over the past month or so I have been redeveloping the website for a small Spanish school in the city of Antigua, Guatemala – Antigua Plaza. I’ve known Ana the owner since the first time I visited Antigua four years ago, and while my wife and I were back in town Ana expressed her interest in having her site turned back into a WordPress site, where things would be easier for her to keep updated. I was only too happy to oblige & got to work taking her existing site content & massaging it into a WordPress theme (Ribosome) that suited well.

I’m super happy with result, and Ana loves the ease with which she can log in & make simple changes. Smiles all ’round!

Theme:

Ribosome – with a few CSS & JS tweaks. This is my first time using this theme, and it’s come out OK. I didn’t like the default colours that came with it, so did some CSS tweaking to overcome that. This is probably something that the pro version offers, but for first time usage I went with what I knew. It’s a pretty simple classic theme, header, body,  sidebar & footer but was pretty easy to customize & I had minimal work to do to make the site look nice (apart from the horrible default colours).

Plugins used:

• Jetpack – I always use tons of goodies from Jetpack, including the CSS editor. I also link the site to my WordPress.com account for remote management
• Easy Pricing Tables Lite – To display the pricing tables on the Prices page & in the sidebar on some pages. My first time using this one, but it seems pretty good & was definitely easy.
• Easy Testimonials – Another first time plugin for me here. Basic custom post type addition going on here. Seems to be done well.
• Google Maps Widget – I purchased a licence for this since it seems to be something I use on virtually all websites I make. Full featured, pretty easy to get the hang of. I think this is going to be money well spent.
• Instagram Feed – Another great full featured plugin that I seem to be using a lot. Even without the Pro version, this thing seems to be extremely customizable. Will keep using
• Meta Slider – Have used this for basic sliders a couple of times now & it is the best I’ve seen so far. A lot of similar plugins introduce a lot of flaky JS, but this one seems pretty solid. Usually needs some CSS tweaks, but it’s solid.
• Custom CSS and Javascript – I like this super simple plugin for doing some basic page load operations, especially when I’m using an out of the box theme. It can be used to do anything you want in JS, but I seem to use it most for changing some simple content on page load, such as footer text, without having to go to the effort of creating a child theme, which is time consuming.
• Yoast SEO – For all your SEO needs – I like the traffic light system.
• User Switching – Not a user facing plugin, but good for admins to test how other users see the admin panel of a site. eg What does an ‘Editor’ see when they’re logged in. Simply go to the Users page & click ‘Switch To’ to see things from their perspective. I use it for all my client sites.