Help wanted: WordPress custom home page design, coding?
 

This site needs your help. :old:

I need an "easy button" for some forum admin tasks. The manual methods are just too unwieldy.


The bounty:

I'm not necessarily asking for free help here -- though it would be nice. Perhaps you can return the favor for my past advice that helped you?

If not, I can offer:
- free Premium Membership (with benefits growing after new site is launched, price increasing)
- discount on my hardware
- some money
- a favor, to be used at a later date, and that's never a bad thing to have with me
- some tape conversion work, either discounted or free (least preferred, but will do it begrudgingly)
- some combination of the above

So, with that out of the way, onto the help needed...


The reason, and a warning:

Our current site is now 10 years old. :screwy:

It has limitations, and has prevented me from writing new guides for several years now.

IMPORTANT: I am not looking for some artsy-farty "web designer", who clickity-clicks in some foo-foo Mac GUI software. I could do that BS myself. I need somebody with an actual understanding of CSS and PHP/WordPress coding.


The project:

Major issues (needs) =
- https is not enabled due to too many hardcoded http calls, and that must be addressed (mostly by avoiding hardcoding in a new template)
- Mobile/responsive CSS is not present, site was made for desktops pre-smartphone

The main site is based on WordPress, and will be again. We have 4 templates as fodder for the new site. The main template is premium theme, and then design/code needs to be borrowed from the others.

Major issues (wants) =
- The main page will be 99% custom to any theme (borrow some elements), tying together a master search, the forum (we already wrote this code snippet), the editorials/articles, the how-to guide, the glossary, the reviews, and the coupons sub-site.
- All sub-sites, including forum (which is already done as a beta), need similar response widths,
- All sub-sites need similar backgrounds

Minor issues:
- I can make the pixel-accurate artwork, but it would be preferred if you can take what already exists, or what is given, and then massage it to work. Improvements are never bad. (What will NOT work is to stretch images, or load huge images but only load in small sizes.)

ASP.NET knowledge will be a plus, as I need help with the glossary. I based the glossary on MySQL, not MSSQL, so it can tie into other sub-sites (forum, guides, etc).


Contact / Questions?

There is more for this. All the code, and a rough template has been mocked-up in Photoshop.

If this is something you can do, PM me, let's discuss. :)

Bumping this one last time before I head of to Upwork or Fiverr (which sucks, but not sure where else to go, several failed attempts now to get this moving).

Email me.

I believe I can help with that. I wrote some WP plugins, and customized themes. Couple years ago, I used to do WP work as a freelancer. let me know what you need and I will see what I can contribute for the website :wink2:

If you get in a bind and something is broken or needs immediate attention I can help. I started my career hacking together wordpress sites. Problem is the people that are really good have moved on and don't want to deal with that kind of thing anymore hah

For the moment, I'm looking for some design advice.

I'm looking at heavily modifying this: https://demo.herothemes.com/helpguru/ (theme)
I've actually looked at it for several years now.
And there's even a WIP version on a dev server (currently offline).

Either that, or a good theme with this: https://heroickb.herothemes.com/ (plugin)
Unsure.
Pro = can be used with more modern themes.
Con = plugins costs 2x as much as theme.
This is where I want to see some example of good themes that can be modified.

And the search would tie into the forum search using Elastic Search.

The "news" or "blog" would be the non-guide articles on the site. (Not sure if the term "editorials" will be used anymore. That never really happened as planned.)

The menu needs to be scrapped, and the same menu (using unique CSS) needs to be on the forum (XenForo), WordPress, and the ASP.NET glossary. Something like this: https://www.eurovps.com. The reason the site currently has a JS menu is because the CSS refused to work correctly in vB all those years ago. I've always hated the JS menu.

You can't Google for this stuff. All you get is crap lists, most of them affiliate links. I easily get frustrated looking at themes, sucks the life out of me. Too many huge images, too much wasted space, huge fonts, slow loading. Ugh. I just need a good designer to make it not look like shit. Not overly fancy, not overly fugly. A designer that can present me with non-stupid design ideas, and I can write "yeah, that's awesome, do that!"

The only requirement I have is on the responsive. I don't want the background to be 100% gone. I like the blue. I want thin slivers of blue on each side for smallest mobile, tiny % larger for large tablet (what I use), and of course desktop has blue beyond main pane. Right now, the site is tiny 1000px or so wide, but should be larger for desktop.

Certain responsive elements (ads) need to go above fold, not all below.

I want this site to "get with the times", but we just cannot do it, I cannot do it alone.

I'd much rather work with somebody that uses this forum, or at least understand this technical sort of niche. Not some random WordPress coder that does everything from mommy blogs to coupon sites, as he likely will not understand our communities needs, wants, and annoyances..