SahDSimone.com

Simple on the surface, this site is very complicated under the hood. Sah came to me as he was starting a new venture in life and wanted a website to match his highly stylized, highly social lifestyle. He needed a site that was tightly integrated with all his social networks and something that was easy for him to use and update. It also had to be SEO-friendly and have a clean and simple but very stylish interface.

We kept things simple and minimal in the interface with no colors and only two fonts, one of which is hosted by the site's CDN and the other hosted by Google to keep things speedy. To add flair and interest we created a separately styled template for the STUDIO page which is most similar to a blog.

For the most part, the development was straightforward. WordPress for the CMS(of course) and a handful of plugins for things like widgets, SEO and stats. And like usual, I recommended him to WP Engine for the decent price, free CDN and automatic updates. Things got really interesting when we wanted to add integration with Instagram as a feature of the site. Instagram offers a very powerful API but doesn't have any plugins for WordPress and the closest thing I could find was for a simple widget. So I coded it out! His site now pulls in images from Instagram, they're browsable and they work like real WordPress posts without actually being stored on the site. I ran into a similar issue trying to create a Pinterest page. Pinterest doesn't have the awesome developer tools that instagram has but it does have an RSS feed. So I pulled images from that and now he has a Pinterest page. I used JetPack's social tools to add simple buttons to the bottom of posts and integrated with facebook's API to add facebook comments to single post pages so that comments will also go to users' news feeds. This was a really fun project just because of the scope of all the APIs I used.

Sah is an expert stylist and you should totally hire him. He's very creative, has great taste and loves what he does. Check out his Styling and Creative Direction pages and leave a comment about how much you love my work ;)