After a couple of weeks of figuring out what content we wanted to put on the DopplerPoint page, and what the structure of the site was going to be, the design of the site itself was quite simple using WordPress! So I guess the last thing left to do is make the first blog post. Now DopplerPoint.com is officially launched!

I’m happy with the widgets and plug-ins we ended up using. I think now that it’s all put together it looks very clean and easy-to-read. There’s a fine line between having too many gadgets on a site and not having enough. I think we handled that nicely.

You might notice the tag cloud near the bottom of the main page. This was intended to show our visitors what we’re into here at DopplerPoint. A little CSS was used to give each word or phrase a weight or importance. We used a little bit of JavaScript to show definitions of each term to make it more interactive.

In the Development Portfolio page, each picture is a link to the full sized image. We used a “Lightbox” widget to create the effect of expanding the picture. It even keeps the original portfolio screen in the background. I just think it looks neat.

The right sidebar has a link to “Live help”. I will be the one who will be the administrator on the other end of this. I’m looking forward to using it. When I’m logged on, the Live Help bar will show visitors that I’m online. Anyone who is visiting the site can have a live text chat with me.

RSS feeds were also added to the sidebar. I’m always looking for good news feeds related to web development and project management. From my experience, it seems that news feeds related to web development are hard to find since most search results are for applications that put news feeds onto your website. However I did find a couple that I could use. Overall the news feeds look very nice with their scrolling display.

You can’t forget about our map that is found in the Contact Us page. I found a really cool utility on the internet that can create Google Maps from scratch. It’s called MapBuilder.net. The utility is very easy to use. All I had to do is answer a few simple questions about my map and then it spits out the code. Actually, this map is the only page on the entire DopplerPoint site that is not a part of the WordPress template.

There are a lot of other cool little features that we used to get the DopplerPoint site up and running but I don’t want to get into too much detail—otherwise I’d be here all day. All-in-all the site looks great in my opinion. I hope you all enjoy it.

Peter Dowling