Property development in NW11 London

Callisti has been helping Glentree new homes with their new Aylmer Place apartment development in north west London. The luxury apartments are at the Hampstead Garden Suburb area near Hampstead Heath so there is access to urban parkland.

The website is a customised wordpress child theme based on the twentyten theme so takes advantage of the custom menu feature and widget sidebars. CSS3 was used to create background gradients in the main content container area and the featured thumbnails were used to give each page a unique header image (required a minor functions.php tweak)

2 of the 5 apartments (prices starting at around a cool £1.15m!) have already been reserved ...

Rotate text in Internet Explorer using CSS and Matrix transform...

Not sure about Internet Explorer 9 yet but there is an excellent online tool for calculating the correct values for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 css filters:

Enter the degrees of rotation and click 'Set'

This will generate CSS for the equivalent values for Firefox, Safari/Chrome and Opera but these can now be more simply stated using, e.g.

-moz-transform:rotate(25deg);
-webkit-transform:rotate(25deg);
-o-transform:rotate(25deg);

The basic filter for IE only allows 90 degree rotations (0, 90, 180, 270) so if you want text or images at a jaunty angle it's not enough. It's worth the extra effort to keep text as text and not resort to imagery.

However, don't expect the text to be as smooth as in other, more capable browsers...

The maths

Vertical text

CSS3 is providing a selection of memes. The old age problem of browser rendering and cross-browser testing heads up again though.

ScottGale.com gives a working solution.

The axis of rotation can vary between browsers and pre Internet Explorer 8 offerings are jippy.

Event Decor Hire - Redecorated

More customised Wordpress theming using child themes here: background static image for the body with CSS3 box shadow and IE8 fallback - CSS3 gradient works in firefox but not safari or ie8 just now but maybe one day...

The revision concentrates on the silver and blue colours of the logo, dispensing with the heavier burgundy so there's an altogether lighter feel to the website. Use was made of the custom menu feature in wordpress 3 to rationalise the content (and make it more user-friendly for the client to update content and images.)

Excalibur Wedding Cars - Mk2

This was fun! A complete revamp of the wedding limousine website using some CSS3 stuff, background image shenanigans, a touch of wordpress plugin-ery and some more experience of using custom themes and menus the way wordpress 3 suggests.

Playing with the custom header images using the set thumbnail function is rewarding but unless you re-define the dimensions of the header image in the wordpress settings, you need to think letterbox or panoramic landscape when selecting images that are going to look right.

Naturally :) there were some editions to functions.php as it still uses the parent theme for this file. The nod to social networking includes facebook like buttons and a recent activity widget.

To ease migration from the previous website, 301 redirects were employed - the xml sitemaps were updated with Yahoo and Google once the SEO-friendly URLs were set.