Design House Digital
Design House Digital is the brainchild of myself and my sister-in-law, Jen Allyson Nugent. It is not very old, and yet it’s already had more traffic than any other site I’ve ever done through Stitchsoft. Jen Allyson Nugent and Spencer Nugent did most of the graphics; graphics aren’t my strong suit.
This web site consists of:
- a store
- a blog
- a tutorial/content area
- forums
- a layout gallery
- a unified ad system
The Store
Design House Digital Store
The store software comes from zen cart. I created a custom theme, then customized the store further to fit our needs.
I had to do some extra customization for a single sign-on in the store and forums. The single sign-on isn’t perfect yet, but the site’s young yet. It’ll come.
There are 10 designers who contribute to the store. Because the zen cart back end is a little difficult to navigate, and we wanted to make things easy for our designers, we created a custom interface for them to load products into the store.
The Blog and Tutorial/Content Area
Design House Digital Blog
We chose to use Wordpress for this, and create a custom Wordpress theme. Spencer Nugent helped me out here, for which I am very grateful. He did a great job.
Design House Digital Classroom
The Forums
Design House Digital Forums
We used phpbb3 for the forums on this site. Again, I created a custom theme.
The Layout Gallery
The layout gallery isn’t done yet, but it will be soon! I’m using Photopost for the gallery. Again, it will use custom templates.
The (un-)Unified Ad System
We chose Google Ad Manager for a unified ad system, and it worked fine, except for the store. We found out the hard way that Google Ad Manager doesn’t support SSL. So the ad system isn’t unified; we use Google Ad Manager most places, but we use the built-in Zen Cart ad system in the store.