I’ve nearly finished the website emirates-mosaic.ae, which enables the customers searching for mosaic art to buy those created by this very artist.

The request was to create a gallery as the main theme of the site and to build some rather static pages around it to explain more about mosaics and how to buy them and such. Furthermore a list of favorite mosaics was to be placed at the right side of the screen.

After considering many platforms, i decided to use wordpress and to extend it’s normal behavior to include the mosaic gallery. Right now, there is no blog on the site so every blog post (technically) is a mosaic-article.

What’s special?

There were some features that had to be incooperated into the whole thing, like a special gallery-shortcode. So instead of putting the shortcode ‘gallery’ into a post, i include the custom shortcode [mosaicg] which includes all the images in the gallery of the post and includes links to the images themselves (not to their respective attachment pages). They’re also formated in a different way: first image is shown as ‘medium’-sized, all others are thumbnails.

Rather than creating own plugins, i included the code for the shortcode and some special widgets into the functions.php of the theme. I think this feature of wordpress should be preserved as it enables a theme developer to easily imitate a plugin and to change the behavior of wordpress fundamentally.

The following plugins were used:

• All in One SEO Pack – that’s a must for most sites
• cforms – For making an offer
• Featplug – for displaying the featured mosaics
• Google Sitemaps – very useful to get different search engines to know your site completely.
• jQuery Lightbox – i changed it to fit the needs here
• StatTraq – the statistics plugin that i myself am maintaining
• Stattraq Queries – a little something i call SEO-wonder. will be released shortly.
• WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT – WOW! You wanna ‘click’ your navigation together and display only those pages/categories/etc. that you want? This is the plugin for you! Honestly, i didn’t expect someone to have the time to code this really awesome plugin
• WordPress Newsletter subscription Opt-in for SendBlaster – maybe will change that..

Go have a look at emirates-mosaic.ae and tell me, if there’s something not working.