The Organization:
Dance Arts Iowa offers a carefully designed and progressive program in dance technique, which takes the young dancer from the primary levels to pre-professional dance.
Dance Arts Iowa offers strong technical training in ballet and encourages students to take Jazz, Tap, and Irish Step Dance to stimulate creativity and enhance rhythm, musicality and fun.
The owner/director Ellis Stroud wanted a new website with more functionality and bright colors! She wanted the new website to match the new colors of their studio which are very bright and cheery!
Due to the number of options we built this site using the Flexx Blog Theme from iThemes Home Page. DAI wanted the rotating images look in the header so we created a base header image with text and changed the background images. We then uploaded the multiple background images and the theme has options to rotate the headers to get a “flash look.” I also like that the navigation buttons can be set above or below the header so we have full use of the header to show what the organization is about.
Next we built a custom graphic with the client’s provided colors to make the page stand out!
Due to the number of options they wanted on the home page we chose both right and left sidebars as well as a footer. This Flexx Blog Theme makes WordPress.org sites look and act very much like what many call a “standard website.” The sidebars, header, footer are consistent through the entire site. We can change that if we like but this is what the customer requested.
The “home page” or landing page was changed to be a static page the client can update. From there we created numerous web pages which are now managed by the client and they contact us for help as needed.
Plugins we used:
The online calendar was very important for managing upcoming events online. We decided to use the Calendar plugin from Kieran O’Shea as we find it’s the best plugin for schedule events that repeat. There’s a full page view as well as sidebar plugins to show upcoming events. The only thing we wish it had was the ability to create a blog post for each entry so clients can be emailed automatically!
Email Subscribers are important as many people still don’t understand RSS. I’m sure RSS makes total sense to all the techies reading this but to show someone what RSS is and then find a reader and then get them to check it, we needed an easy way to allow people to subscribe to upcoming events. So we used one of our favorites Subscribe2 by Matthew Robinson. The plugin allows visitors to enter their email address and subscribe to blog posts/updates. You can manually add people to your list and there’s no need to configure an email server or anything like that. Configure a few options and add the widget to the sidebar and you can build your email subscriber list.
One note on this topic: If you have multiple blogs and you want to build a single subscriber list you’ll need to use a service like aWeber. Setup one email list at aWeber, copy the code into EACH WordPress site and when people subscribe to any site or you update any site everyone gets the update. You can also customize the emails to clients more with aWeber. Click here to learn more: http://aweber.com/?313785
For the photo galleries we used non other than NextGen Galleries plugin. With NextGen you can create multiple galleries of photos, resize photos and even combine photos into albums. From there you can upload various flash or swf players to display the photos in moving “flash” galleries or individual photos. 
