Brand New Series in The Lodge: Building a Mobile-First WordPress-Powered Artists Website

Avatar of Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

I finished up a brand new series in The Lodge! It’s all about building a website from scratch. My friend Jeff, the ceramic artist’s website, to be specific.

It is a 40-video series that goes from a blank canvas to done. It covers every decision made, every line of code written, every pixel plotted, and every toggle toggled.

We start out how all non-personal redesigns start, with the clients desires for a new site. What drives it? What goals do they have? Can we discover any deeper themes? Can we organize and put a point on it all?

Then we look at Jeff’s work and the recent changes in aesthetics to it, specifically in how he photographs it. We take queues from that in designing the new site.

Jeff is sold on the idea of a mobile-first philosophy. Not through us explaining it to him, but by merely suggesting “Hey what do you think about designing site on the phone first?” and letting him figure out the obvious advantages there.

Then we design and build build build!

We want to give Jeff as much control as we can, so we leverage the abilities of WordPress to be a truly customized CMS to give him that control. The slider on the homepage is controlled by “custom post types” that Jeff can add, remove, edit , and even re-order easily all through the WordPress admin area. Events are handled the same way. Not through just categorized posts or pages, but entry screens we create just for this type of content.

We finish off by making sure the site looks good on larger screens as well, even adding in additional content because we have the space to support it.

Interested? Sign up for The Lodge to watch them. If you do, you’ll also have access to the 150+ video series detailing the redesign of CSS-Tricks (v10) as well!