Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

Portfolio Altas logo

We’ve completed a significant beginning step in our plan to redesign and expand Portfolio Atlas. For those who don’t know, Portfolio Atlas is an online service for artists to create and manage their own online porfolio website. We started it back in 2002 and are now beginning a new push to spread the news and get more people to sign up.

Part of that push is redesigning the portal site to better explain what the service is and also how it works. The portal site itself has never had a CMS so our first step was to put the existing site and content into a tool and WordPress fit the bill because we can use it to create and maintain lots of content and we can just leave the registration/checkout and artist directory sections as is and WordPress won’t get in the way.

The setup was of course very easy - just creating a new theme, moving over the body content and then changing some element ids and classes in the stylesheet to match the WordPress syntax. Even better, now we have some good SEO elements wired in via plugins. Also, now we’re ready to start adding in lots more content: help content, pages about the benefits and features of the service and pretty soon a blog to keep people up to date on the site and all the artists.

Next up is an actual redeisgn. It should be something pretty simple that looks a lot like a gallery website - i.e. like the site you can create for your artwork, but still something with a little more oomph!

So stay tuned in for updates by subscribing to the Portfolio Atlas RSS feed - oh and you can also follow us on our facebook group.

After a good struggle, I’ve finally gotten the install working again!

It all started when we switched from running the site from http://sharpdotinc.com to http://www.sharpdotinc.com - i.e. we added the WWW. Mike and Amber worked that out earlier today and that was great but then I noticed tonight that the flash did not like mixing the 2. The old posts had image paths pointing to sharpdotinc.com and when the flash loaded those images it threw security errors because it was loaded from www.sharpdotinc.com. I saw that for some reason the blog posts weren’t working - i got a 404 on any individual post. Then then I came across the problem we had earlier with not being able to login to our sub-user accounts. This was blocking us from blogging at all so I couldn’t even test. After some digging I thought that maybe there were stray paths in the database that were the issue. So I downloaded a dump of the database, did a find/replace and then re-imported it. That did the trick!

Whew - now it’s time for some battlestar…