Hi all,
Just a quick bit of background. I work for the UK Border Agency, as a Detector Dog Handler (Drugs sniffer dogs), and for the past few years I’ve wanted to create a website that will allow dog owners to upload and share places to walk.
I find myself regularly traveling away from home as part of my job, and when I do, I thought it would be good to have somewhere to look up local walks/areas.
So the idea of Walkiees was born!
Now Ive been an avid internet users for many years, and I attempted a few times to try and create this type of site using CMS/Blog software such as Wordpress, but never really accomplished anything, and I was always trying to do it with free plugins/themes.
At the start of 2012, I decided it was time to go for it. I spent a month building my design in Photoshop (I program I am quite familiar with) and I sent it off to p2H (psd2html.com) who (like there names suggests) sliced it up into a nice set of HTML/CSS/JS files.
A buddy of mine, who is a web designer, said that they had recently switched all their site builds to EE, and that I should look into it.
I started consuming as much tutorials, podcasts and information as I could. I got the files back from p2h on the 20th of February, bought and installed EE, and had a go. I’ve never touched EE before, and I had VERY limited knowledge of HTML/CSS, but with the great support that I received here, Solspace, gwcode, and many many more support forums, I finally managed to get the site ready for its initial launch.
So yesterday was the day. It was moved off the development server and onto the main domain and…
I’m very proud and pleased to introduce Walkiees!
Feel free to have a look around, sign up, add a walk, get involved!
I doubt very much that I have put the site together in the most efficient way, and its somewhat simplistic at the moment, but I think I have a good base to keep working and developing on.
So what did I use?
As i have always enjoyed reading what add-ons others use I’ll list mine here.
Solspace User - for templating my member areas
Solspace Favourites - for the adding removing of favs and bookmarks. (big thumbs up to Solspace’s Nic for help in the Ajaxifying of this!)
Solspace Ratings - To rate my walks
MX Google Maps - to locate the walk in the submission form and display it on a walk page.
NAVee - Main nav
Matrix - holds my photo galleries for each walk
SEO Lite - Just started using for better SEO keywords/descriptions
AB Pagination - customised pagination
Accessible Captcha - stopped my spammers!
Twomile Login Redirect - Gives better control over my redirects
Custom System Messages - brought everything into my templates!
Draggable - makes sorting easier
CP Analytics Settings - keep an eye on things
There might be a few more but these are the main ones.
If anyone has any suggestions or thoughts, criticism, or anything, I’ll be glad to hear it!
Hope you enjoy!