{white hats webworks}

Emphatic Technologies

whitehats — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:42:22 +0000

Recently deployed the website for Emphatic Technologies. The guys at Emphatic Technologies are our friends who focus on Mobile Application development and SEO.

The website was created using 960 Grid system.

Footerama in Smashing Mag’s tweet

whitehats — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:22:22 +0000

Smashing Magazine tweets about Footerama! It feels like as if your child is in Dean’s list.

Sadly, Footerama couldn’ take it and it’s server went down! We are working hard on resolving the issue, and soon will be back up with a couple of features added. Please bear with us in our 15 minutes of fame.

Are you paying attention?!

whitehats — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:08:28 +0000

“There are two kinds of men who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else.”

– Cyrus H. Curtis

AnuKram – the First Look

whitehats — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:58:52 +0000

AnuKram (Sanskrit for Index) is a minimalist wordpress theme where the emphasis is on the content. The index page, as you can see, resembles the content, index page of an old-age book. The theme is based off Typogridphy framework for its excellent typography support.

Soon to release..

After looking at some HTML5 coding, we have decided to make AnuKram a HTML5 theme. More reasons to enjoy!!

New Colors

whitehats — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:33:52 +0000

So we ditch white!!!

Not from our work ethics. From our website colors. And we go daring – pink. And minimal than before. So no sidebars. We dreaded them when we had to use them on Footerama. This is rather plain. But it’s interesting. There are some cool CSS tricks there, like pull quotes. The posts will not follow one boring template.

What do you think? Like it? Hate it? Loved it, or can’t stand it?

Footerama

whitehats — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:07:35 +0000

Footerama is the footer design gallery conceptualized, designed, developed and maintained by White Hats Webworks.
Designed using 960.gs grid framework
Used Masonry jQuery script for a vertical layout
Used film noir theme for the design with minimal color variations and film credit titles in the footer
Converted the layout to a complete Variable Grid layout using jQuery.vGrid plugin. Now the number of columns displayed is dependent on the screen resolution.
the sidebar is sliding panel and navigation tabs are aligned right giving a lot of room for the content.
added Related posts plugin to increase user engagement.
changed the background color to gray for better readability. Still in sync with the film noir theme.

HighChoiceLowPrice

whitehats — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:37:54 +0000

This eCommerce website was developed from design provided.
Used WordPress as Content Management System
Used WP e-Commerce Plugin as the shopping cart solution
Customized the WP e-Commerce plugin for given requirements.

InfinityDiscs

whitehats — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:25:13 +0000

Web Re-design – the old website of Infinity Discs was created using a ready-made template. We created a quick static html template for them which not only looked better, but was very SEO friendly.
SEO – the traffic at InfinityDiscs jumped 100% after the site re-design and SEO initiative.
Social Media Marketing for Infinity Discs
Infinity Discs ranks on Google’s 1st page for selected keywords “CD Duplication” in local search results for Atlanta and 6 other cities.

FooteRama.com, and a few free WordPress themes!!

whitehats — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:22:12 +0000

The planned footer designs gallery, http://footerama.com is about to go live. I have just uploaded a temp page with a form for visitors to submit cool website footer designs which I will then add to the database once the website is live.

In addition to that I will be releasing TWO free WordPress themes soon. One called NineteenFortySeven is a newspaper theme, and second one called Anucram for now is based off pocketbooks. Intrigued? Well, you must be!

Keep checking this space for more info.

WP (WordPress) eCommerce Plugin Customization

whitehats — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:23:49 +0000

Recently we had a web development assignment for an eCommerce website.

Due to some circumstances not interesting to others, we decided to develop the website using WordPress 2.8.4 using WhiteSpace theme by Brian Gardner and Zen Cart. After some research WP eCommerce 3.7.4 by Instinct was looking a good choice, if we had to move away from ZC. It was always kept in mind to integrate Zen Cart with WordPress as for some reasons and articles I read online, integration of ZC and WP was easier than configuration of ZC for a static website.
WP eCommerce comes in different flavors – free version that comes with a lot of goodies, and the Gold Cart version with some additional features like Grid View for products.
Our challenges were:

Our shopping cart wasn’t working as it should.
- None of the gateways worked for any Indian Billing or Shipping address.
- PayPal gateway worked fine for a non-Indian shipping address, while the Manual gateway worked at its own whim.
- When the “Make Purchase” button was clicked, all it did was refresh the Check Out page. On Local installation everything worked fine.
Split the categories between the Left Sidebar and Top Navigation bar. Exclude the Top Products category from the Left Sidebar along with other categories.
Display images in the list of Top Products.

Let’s see how each issue was tackled one-by-one:

What you need – download WPStore theme by WPFeed.com. We are going to use functions from this theme for our purpose.

WP eCommerce is a very helpful plugin for creating WordPress based small shops. The plugin comes with great in-built functionality, however, one wishes there were more customizations available for no price.

1. WP eCommerce Shopping Cart fix -

Since the local installation was working as smooth as possible, there was definitely something fishy on the live server side. The issue was found at the most unusual place – the Shipping address (unusual because one, shipping address was not mandatory and two, often when shipping address was selected to be same as billing address the problem would not appear).

The STATE field in the shipping address was mandatory in the eCommerce Shipping Info. configuration. However for some weird reason, this field was not appearing on the front-end screen. So when the ‘Make Purchase’ button was clicked, the Java Script gave “Fill all the required fields” error. It would become confusing for the user because the input field ‘STATE’ was not on the screen at all.

2. Display Product Categories at Different Locations -
We split the Product Categories in two Groups – Categories and Header Nav categories.
If you look in functions.php, the Show_cats function is displayed by the Group Id. This Group ID for the Header Nav group was ‘3′, as the default installation had used 1 and 2 for categories and brands. We created a new function, show_tagline_cat using the same code of show_Cats but with hard-coded group_id 3. The same function was added in the header file to display desired categories links.
During this we also tackled another challenge – sorting the categories. Right now categories are sorted by as-added basis. We have changed this to display them in descending order but it can be changed to display alphabetically as well.

3. Display images in Top Products list -
Adding the code from function display_latest_products to function display_top_products – both from the function.php of WPStore theme. The Latest Products function is set to display product images and the same code can be recycled to display images along with the Top Products as well. You can add a loop in the new function to limit the number of displayed Top Products.
The website looks like this – http://www.highchoicelowprice.com . We have some tidying up to do in the CSS, but it is functional and our client wants to continue with that for now.
Feel free to comment or send questions if you have any.

PS: A super thanks to Jigar Pandya for his untiring help during this entire mission.