Urbanism: “The culture or way of life of city dwellers.”

I moved to downtown Milwaukee in 2002 and have since become both a fan of the city and a fan of city life.  I found that the lifestyle of living, working, and playing all within the city could allow me to make a great living, enjoy more of my time, interact regularly with people from a wide background, live green, and enjoy a higher quality of life.  It is this passion for urbanism and Milwaukee that grew into a new joint venture between Texo Development and fellow Milwaukee tech shop Fresh Coast Ventures.  Jeramey Jannene co-founder of Fresh Coast Ventures started UrbanMilwaukee.com in early 2007 with a similar passion for Milwaukee and urban life.  Our combined efforts intend to allow UrbanMilwaukee.com to cover a wider array of issues including mass transit, public spaces, local government, and economic development projects in Milwaukee.   Truly our goal is to “Champion Urban Life in the Cream City.”

Not only did we teamed up with  Fresh Coast Ventures to be partners in content creation but also to develop the look and feel of UrbanMilwaukee.com.  First we selected Wordpress as the platform for this project because it gives you the tools you need to get a site up fast, yet the flexibility to make the site your own. Next, we considered a variety of themes including a more businesslike look and feel, a web magazine style that allows a clean split of categories, and enough open spaces for customization. The base theme we settled on was BranfordMagazine because this theme had many valuable features and displays content in the style of magazine.  Although the BranfordMagazine theme was a good starting point it required numerous updates to achieve what we had in mind.  The five major improvements we made were:

1. Plugin to Manage theme settings - This plugins handles which categories are displayed on the homepage’s.  The BranfordMagazine theme based category selection on hardcoded values which would make data conversion from an existing site difficult and took away from the ability to customize the homepage. 
   
2. Enhanced Top Level Navigation -  The navigation was customized to support both categories and pages as part of the dropdown menuing system.
   
3. Custom Header Image - On category pages the header image changes to match the category page a user is viewing if a matching image is available.
   
4. flickr Integration - On category pages flickr images from the flickr group “UrbanMilwaukee” display in the right hand sidebar based on matching the category to the tag.
   
5. del.icio.us Integration - On category pages del.icio.us links display in the right hand sidebar based on matching the category to the tag.
   

We look forward to evolving UrbanMilwaukee.com, and to continuing development work.  If you are interested in a Wordpress site, drop us a line and let’s talk.

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