Monzilla Media recently designed a fresh new site for my personal graphical archives site, Perishable.biz. The site is built entirely with WordPress and uses absolutely no plugins whatsoever. The result is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that is flexible, scalable, and easy to use.

The Perishable.biz site is the artistic/creative companion site for my web-design and development site, Perishable Press. Perishable.biz is designed to facilitate the online presentation and management of my vast graphical archive collection, which includes a wide variety of media formats, including everything from pen-&-ink drawings and watercolor paintings to digital collage and multimedia (audio & video) creations.

To keep things as organized and scalable as possible, four broad categories were established for organizing content: “Chunks,” “Photos,” “Artwork,” and “Mixed.” Within each of these categories, content is further classified using WordPress’ powerful tagging system. Several peripheral pages were also created for the site, “About,” “Contact,” and so on.

With this site architecture in place, the design works to draw attention to the site itself, and then fade quietly into the background as the user begins viewing the content. This is accomplished with dazzling colorful shapes around the periphery and bold minimalist layout for content areas. To help visitors intuitively navigate and understand the different categories, the site’s different page views — home page, single-post, category, archive, etc. — are each styled to enhance and emphasize the particular type of content being viewed.

Features of the site include:

• Well-styled with valid CSS 2.1
• Lovingly hand-crafted with valid HTML 4.01 Strict
• Super-tight conditionally loading navigational system
• Advanced use of WordPress’ Custom Fields for flexibility and scalability
• Floatbox lightbox-style image viewing functionality for images, videos, and more
• Strong security measures and anti-spam strategy to ensure safe and secure site
• Absolutely NO plugins, hacks, or custom functions are used for this site — it’s 100% pure virgin WordPress, making maintenance a breeze and ensuring extremely fast loading times for visitors.

I am absolutely thrilled with the way this site turned out, and can see myself using it for several years to come. But even then, when the time comes to redesign with something fresh, the underlying site architecture and content organization will facilitate and ensure a relatively pain-free updating experience.

Check it out at: Perishable.biz.