Ashford child themes
Both of the sites profiled here, use Ashford as their parent theme adding a custom child theme to give it the right visual design. This means they are free to upgrade to any future release of Ashford and get every new feature I build without changing their child theme.
Ashford for small business portfolios
St. Paul Fabrication and Decorating is a nice example of how Ashford extends WordPress to make it easy to build, maintain and grow a small business.
They are using an Ashford Lightbox plugin (scheduled for release soon) that auto-magically applies this affect to any thumbnail inserted into a page (so no additional work needed). This is a great feature—that is easy to use—for any business that wants to show portfolio images. They manually inserted thumbnails, and I’m currently testing the short code gallery code.
This plugin is designed to extend Ashford’s core feature set. Unlike many other WordPress themes and plugins, Ashford follows the best practices published by Yahoo! Yslow team and moved all scripts to the bottom of the page . So, we had to code this jQuery plugin for use just for Ashford. This means that sites built with Ashford are optimized for loading as fast as possible.
Ashford for marketing campaigns
Reign Ministries is using Ashford to manage their micro-site and Adsense campaign to grow their short term missions programs. Royal Servants and Karios are the WordPress versions of their main Drupal web site. Using WordPress instead of Drupal to run their micro-sites give them the ability to go quicker to market with their Adsense campaigns.
It also allows them the ability to quickly create micro-sites in the future to support any campaign then require since they are using Ashford as their parent theme with a custom Reign child theme. This gives them flexibility and a way to build backlinks to their main site.
How they did it
While these are clients of mine, they executed these sites without my intervention. They were able to use WordPress and the support documentation I provide on this site — to execute several nicely done sites. I gather feedback from clients like these to make Ashford better and better, then release it back to the community for free.
New default theme design and mobile features
The next release of Ashford will have some updates for search engine opimization and I will also be releasing two Ashford plugins (Ashford Lightbox and Ashford Related Pages). I am concentrating now on organizing the support documentation and giving Ashford a “new” default visual design.
Then after that you can expect some cool new page templates (think hero images and post carousels), more navigation controls (add categories and subscribe button).
The next big Ashford feature will be when it offers built-in mobile. then the be able to view your Ashford site on your iPhone or G1 Android phone (it will work automatically and built in).
Find more like this: Featured Posts , adsense, Business, child theme, lightbox, micro-site, mobile, nonprofit, parent theme, seo, small business
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March 3, 2009
7:18 am
We are excited to use Ashford because we see a lot of potential for creating a very simple, effective website that is very easy to use.
October 11, 2009
2:44 am
I am volunteering my services to the Marin Professionals Association, which is a not profit community of unemployed professionals sponsored by EDD. I am trying to develop a publishing platform for the Marin Professionals community where members can be trained on WEB 2.0 and social network while using the association as means of networking into their next job experience.
I have registered the domain above initially with Godaddy, then 1and1 where I had the website hosted for a while. recently I went back to the Godaddy(deluxe package) hosting services because I understand they are able to provide inexpensive and easy to utilize hosting services. That way, the Marin Professionals’ members will be able to register into the marinprofessionals.com website and then volunteer their services while blogging during their job search and networking for leads and interviews in this safe environment.
I am using WordPress because I was told it is the easiest way to get a template and customize it. I looked at the WordPress showcase and found a website I really would like to utilize as a sample: ït is called “umwblogs.org” which is the publishing platform for the Mary Washington community.
Can you help me selecting a way to find a WrodPress template that allows for membership publishing?
October 16, 2009
7:33 am
Wanda — your requirements often show me that you may need to be looking at Drupal rather than WordPress as a solution.
If you are to stay with WordPress, you should look at BuddyPress which is a plugin that adds a Ning.com like social network to your site.
However, be warned, what you are doing is hard and a lot of work to do it well.