My only celebrity client, Niecy Nash, is great to work with. She and her staff are always friendly and they love the work we do. In fact, NiecyNash.com was the first custom Content Management WordPress theme I developed. Looking back on it, admittedly, I did a lot of things wrong and would definitely do it differently this time. On the flip side, it was a great experience and solidified my love for WordPress as a content management system.
Niecy really wanted to have animation as part of the navigation and because search engine optimization was not a concern, we chose to use Flash in the navigation plus other elements in the site like the home page main promotion and the image gallery which uses Flash and XML. Today I would do the Flash image gallery with some kind of WordPress Plug-in or even do a custom JQuery implementation with something like GalleryView.
Niecy’s site is pretty straight forward and since it was my first custom theme, doesn’t have a lot of wiz-bangs, but it is a solid, well performing site that has successfully stood up to heavy traffic. Since I do most of the updates, I find it to be a very user friendly theme and easy to update. Recently we added two new sections for her new television shows and I’ve integrated her Twitter feed and her TwitPics into various sections of the web site.
