The home page of the Mom's Guide to San Diego
The home page of The Mom’s Guide. (Click to view image in a larger size.)

“The Mom’s Guide to San Diego” is a website providing tips to parents for things to do with their kids in the big Californian city. Although the site was originally developed by someone else a long time ago, the owner recently hired me to do a variety of repairs, enhancements, and additions to it, while also requesting to keep its visual style mostly the same.

The Old Site and Its Technical Problems

The old website of The Mom’s Guide was, and still is, powered by WordPress, which is an online system that makes it easy for website owners to write and edit content on pages without needing to code anything or manually upload files to servers.

There were several technical problems with the old Mom’s Guide site, causing a sub-par user experience. Most of these problems involved the original custom-made WordPress theme, which I hadn’t made. These were the biggest issues with the old site:

  • The custom WordPress theme was very outdated and hadn’t been maintained over the years with the constantly evolving states of WordPress and the numerous plugins installed on the site. As a result, the website had gotten glitchy.
  • The site’s layout wasn’t optimized at all for viewing on mobile devices (another sign of the theme’s age).
  • The site used a decorative handwriting typeface for headings, which is fine, but these headings were in the form of “fake” text in images rather than “real” text using a web font file. The trouble here is that text within images lose the SEO (search engine optimization) benefits and user accessibility that real text has.
  • The custom theme wasn’t entirely developed to proper W3C coding standards. For example, <h1> and <h2> tags were missing for some headings, table tags were sometimes used for layout instead of tabular data, and some links weren’t closed with closing anchor tags.
  • The site included a page containing an Adobe Flash document that didn’t even work anymore. Even if it did still work, Flash is completely inaccessible on mobile devices, and Adobe will soon phase it out for desktop computers too.
  • The site had a strangely tiny font size.

My Improvements

When the owner of The Mom’s Guide hired me to improve her website, I fixed all the problems mentioned above. I kept WordPress installed, but I removed or replaced depreciated or erroneous functions using the WordPress PHP function WP_DEBUG and the plugin Theme Check as aids (on an offline copy of the website).

I also made several extra enhancements to the site, many of which include the following:

  • I used more interesting fonts to replace the banal, computer-default fonts Verdana and Georgia that the site’s WordPress theme originally used. I applied the Google Fonts “Muli” for body text and “Rancho” for headings.
  • I added “EDIT” buttons to every page with an area that’s editable in WordPress. The Edit buttons are for the convenience of the site owner, and they’re invisible to everyone except her.
  • Previously in the “Family-Friendly Businesses” section’s directory pages, each business was in a box, and most of these boxes had a fixed, uniform height, which resulted in excess space for the boxes containing less information. I applied the jQuery plugin Masonry for these pages to remove the awkward gaps between each listed business.

The web page for the Mom’s Guide swim classes directory as seen on the old theme (1st image) and on the new one that I made (2nd image). The new theme includes “EDIT” buttons on every business box that are invisible to everyone except the site owner.
  • I improved the overall appearance of the calendar on the Local Events page. Additionally, when the page is viewed at narrow browser viewports (like on smartphones), I gave the calendar the ability to transform into a vertical list for much better readability. (Without that transforming ability, users on smartphones would have to scroll the page sideways in order to see the other side of the calendar.)

The original Local Events calendar (1st image) and the redesigned one by me (2nd image). Both screenshots show the pop-up box that appears when the mouse pointer hovers over an event link.
  • Some sections of the website contained text that was hard-coded into the theme’s PHP files, which means the client wouldn’t be able to edit them through the WordPress editor. I made changes to the theme to make those sections become editable.
  • The client requested me to make whole new “Guide” pages to the website. For these new pages, I created custom WordPress post types with their own structuring and styling.
  • I replaced some generic <div> tags with the more semantic HTML 5 tags where appropriate, such as <nav>, <footer>, <aside>, etc.
  • I made the site’s previously disorderly color scheme a little more visually consistent while still preserving its colorfulness.
  • I made various miscellaneous improvements in appearance and usability throughout the site.
  • I converted the site’s protocol from insecure HTTP to secure HTTPS.
  • I switched the site’s web server’s PHP version from 5.4 to 7.2 (for security and speed benefits).

I also occasionally gave some advice to the client. For example, she once requested me to put an extra space for advertisements in the rightmost sidebar on the home page. I cautioned her this could be a bad idea, because if visitors notice an ad in that sidebar, then they might incorrectly assume the important image-based links next to it are also ads, which may cause visitors to ignore them rather than to go click on them. Convinced, the client changed her mind, and instead we put ad spaces in more appropriate places on the site.

Client's Testimonial

There is absolutely nothing that I can say that Damian did not excel at. He has great communication and accomplished everything I was looking for in my customized WordPress theme. I really enjoyed working with him and love my new site!

— Jenny Humora

See the Website

Update: It seems The Mom’s Guide has been discontinued during the COVID-19 pandemic, and so the live website is no longer available. However, you can view certain semi-functional archived pages via the Wayback Machine.

What's Next?

If you need a website newly designed or re-designed, with or without WordPress, consider hiring me!

Similar Projects

To read about some other websites I created, see: