The Guild of Photographers
"WOW…WOW…WOW!!! 110% spot on!" Steve Thirsk, The Guild of Photographers
The Guild of Photographers site was quite old, and they wanted to redesign and expand it.
The heart of the site was a directory, which had been custom-developed for them: photographers could sign up for membership and create their directory entry all in one go, adding contact info and a gallery of photos. The directory suited the Guild, but the problem was that they weren't able to update the actual pages of the site. They also had plans for expanding the site – they wanted to have a members' area with a forum, news, and lots of information; and a fresher design.
A WordPress site would allow them to edit the site themselves, also to have the forum, news, and membership features that they wanted. But we couldn't find a WordPress-compatible directory that did what they needed it to do.
So in the end, we decided to take the best of both worlds. We would keep the existing system for the directory, but add a WordPress site to handle everything else.
And that's what we did. We planned the structure of the new site to allow for a members-only area. We also pruned some pages that were no longer relevant, and added some that were needed. I created a new design, using the beautiful work of some of the Guild's members to showcase their passion on the home page. For the other pages, I kept the design simple, to allow the content to speak for itself. I then recoded and restyled the header and footer of the directory pages to match the main site, and added a search form to the new home page, while the Guild's previous development team worked on the directory code to make sure the two installations would work happily alongside each other.
The site uses the Wishlist Member plugin to handle its membership features, and the Simple:Press plugin for the forum.