Here’s an awesome WordPress site to check out: Batman News. It’s a blog about all things Batman, and it is pretty awesome. I think it’s really well designed and put together. It was built by Brady and Brody Vercher, of Blazer Six. Great job, y’all. h/t Erik Ford.
4 thoughts on “Site showcase: Batman News”
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Thanks Brian! We enjoyed working on Batman News with Chris Begley to help him realize his vision and are excited about the launch.
Hope you don’t mind, but I think it might be nice if the people behind site features like this in the future share a few tips, thoughts, or lessons learned about the project that they might not mention elsewhere.
I’m still on the fence about Jetpack, but it’s found its way into a couple of our recent projects. On this one in particular, the Photon service was invaluable. At this point, it’s basically a free CDN and saved Chris a bunch in fees when he implemented it prior to our involvement. On top of that, it will detect HiDPI devices and serve higher resolution images automatically–even in the post content. Check out the site on a Retina device and it looks pretty dang sharp.
I’ve tested a ton of the slider/carousel scripts out there and even wrote a couple of my own, but eventually settled on FlexSlider. Lately, though, it just hasn’t been cutting it, especially for responsive sites. Touch support could use some work for a more native scrolling experience and the inability to easily destroy and recreate instances at different breakpoints is a pain. I’d love to know if there’s an open source alternative that anyone is using.
We ran into a few bugs in plugins and even core. I submitted some bug reports, but resorted to forking a couple of plugins. There was a discussion a few months ago about vetting the quality of plugins and I think reviews were born from that, but they don’t seem to have had any meaningful impact. Surprisingly, the commercial plugins we used seem to suffer more from a lack of documentation and an easy way to submit bug reports/fixes.
I’m also surprised there aren’t any worthwhile responsive advertising solutions available yet. That’s definitely an area that could use some attention.
I completely agree with your analysis in general. I too have noticed some issues with Flexslider on mobile (like vertical scrolling – it completely gets stuck if you start the swipe from inside the slider).
Also, I’ve experienced pain on the ads too. This is how I’m doing it. Yours seems similar, am I correct?
I try to only use Jetpack when needed for client work, but I do find it to be valuable for most of my own projects. The whole .com account thing is confusing to clients. But you’re right, some of the features are great to have. I could go on for a while about this : )
Great work, I really dig it!
Yep, that’s the same method I used for responsive ads. I didn’t run across
GA_googleFillSlot(), so that’s a little more elegant for an AdSense-only solution. Other networks, and even direct ads come into play here, so those have to be displayed via JavaScript as well.I’d like to echo Brady’s gratitude for showcasing the site and say thanks for the compliments on the design. It’s much appreciated.