Today is the launch of ridesandrivers.com. It is the personal blog of a semi-pro mountain bike rider, Trout Unlimited State Chapter President, and all around cool guy Sinjin Ebelre.

Design Brief

Sinjin was after a custom redesign of his WordPress blog which was a pretty standard looking WordPress template. He really wanted something custom that would show off his sponsors and highlight what is going on his world.

The Solution

This site was a lot of fun to work on and it is packed with some really cool features. As always the design was born while burning the midnight oil and sketching with pen and paper. Below was my initial concept with my chicken scratches all over it.

The response was overwhelmingly positive.

From the wire-frame I moved onto Photoshop comps. Which were also well received. After that it was off to production.

I am very pleased with the final product. The site came together very quickly for a custom WordPress design. I know it will get a lot of use and was well worth the effort.

A lot of the site is built using new CSS3 features. If you view the site in a modern up to date browser (IE 8.0, firefox, Opera or Safari). You will see features that users without an updated browser will miss. You get to see custom fonts, drop shadows, and much more. Visitors to the site without an updated version will still get a great experience just not as good as it could be.

Also, I created a series of custom icons for the different categories on the site. These icons are rendered automatically based on the category chosen by Sinjin. Pretty slick little feature there.

Lastly since this was technically a redesign of an old site I had to import a ton of old posts into his new site. None of the old posts used the thumbnail feature available on newer releases of WordPress. So I had to write code to spit out a custom image for those posts. Basically it says “if a thumbnail exists, show it. If not show this image” Pretty basic stuff, but without it much of the site wouldn’t work.