Time for another site launch, this one a redesign for one of my longest standing clients.
I designed the first website for Financial Education Professionals in 2003, when it was a two-person operation run from a home office.
Nowadays, FEP has an office just off Circular Quay in Sydney, with a permanent staff of seven and a team of part-time financial trainers working throughout Australia and South East Asia. And a new website.
As you can imagine, it continues to be a privilege to have a client for long enough to work through several site redesigns – and I’ve written about that before, here and here – but it’s also gratifying to think that my work on the FEP web presence has contributed to their success and ongoing expansion.
For the latest site redesign, I stayed with WordPress as the content management system but took the opportunity to work with a theme called Absolum, which I have previously admired but never used.
I’d recommend Absolum to anyone who wants a robust, flexible theme that will withstand a fair bit of customisation and still look great in all modern browsers. It uses the plain HTML doctype with divs, and provides a facility to add custom styling – although I still found myself editing style.css directly, and the php files, for that matter.
As well as the usual Akismet, WordPress Automatic Upgrade and WordPress FireWall (version 2) plug-ins, I installed Contact Form 7 as it powers the Contact Form 7 Widget option to easily customise and place a contact form in a sidebar, and NewsTicker Aink for a scrolling display of training courses, again allowing an adequate amount of easy styling.
I used Typekit to display Pragmatica font for the site title.
For the record, I’m not bothered that Internet Explorer won’t display the text-shadow used on the site title and elsewhere. It limits but doesn’t spoil the intended visual effect and, importantly, it doesn’t undermine actionable information bering provided or affect the functionality of the site in general.