B. Scott Site Finished

Multi-tasking… It would be Ok if it was just 3 or 4 projects, but trying to multitask 45 projects is insane. lol. Well I finally finished one of them… I was to build a blog site for a guy who is an internet personality. I’ve never heard of him, but apparantly he’s pretty damn popular. He has 31,500+ facebook likes to his fanpage; He has had a radio show on Jamie Fox Sirrus station; he has interviews with Mariah Carey, Tyra Banks, and other celebrities; He has hundreds of thousands of views to most of his Youtube videos; a wikipedia page; and Rihanna just retweeted his tweet!!! I’m mad… Rihanna hasn’t retweeted my tweets. lol.

His focus was on advertising, so I laced it with ads all over the place. Ad Skins, in-post ads, sidebar ads, leaderboards, banners, etc.. Overkill? Nope, he wants it like that. I checked other similar sites and they all flood their sites with ads. I can understand why though, He has people offering him a few thousand for ad space. A wine company is paying him a couple thousand just to have their bottle in his youtube video. Must be nice.

Well you can check out his site here: http://lovebscott.com

What theme?

CATALYST of course! If you can imagine it, than you can do it with Catalyst. It’s very simple to create custom pages, layouts, hooks, etc. Easily set widths, footer columns, and more. If you can’t code, no problem, they have made it easy for non-coders by making most of the css easily editable from their options pages. But I found it easier (and faster) to just use firebug and enter my own CSS than messing with their CSS Builder section.

What Plugins?

• Digg Digg Social Plugin – An extremely customizable social bookmark plugin. This is a part of my arsenol. Digg Digg features a floating social box, inline buttons, small or large, counts or no counts, you can even manually place shortcode wherever you want social buttons
• FS Contact Form – I use this on every site. Create multiple forms; add custom fields; Set required or not. I used it for the contact form and the advertise page on his site
• Sidebar Login – This I had to hack so that it will redirect to the wp-login page because I can only use the facebook connect from that page. But I like this plugin because once logged in, it displays your avatar on the sidebar
• WP-DBManager – Great plugin to optimize and automatically backup your sql databases. It will email them to you
• Custom Post Type Shortcode – allows you to list custom post types on any page (or post) via shortcode. The downfall to this plugin is that it does not support pagination yet, but the developer states that it is in the works. You can still get Custom Post Types to paginate via Archive Categories. i.e., YourSite.com/CustomPostType/. Then use Catalyst to determine if you will show exerpts or full content (FYI exerpts will only display thumbnail of featured image and text [not videos etc])
• All In One SEO – Doesn’t everyone use this? lol. I like Platinum SEO more (lately) but it was conflicting with the theme or another plugin. I Didn’t have time to waste trying to figure it out
• Embed Iframe – I don’t like Iframes, but this plugin worked well. I used it to wrap his store website inside of his blogs theme/site
• Ultimate Facebook – To get that large facebook box on the sidebar where it displays thumbnails of the people that are following
• Recent Posts Plus – Very customizable plugin to replace the default recent posts plugins. It allows you to display specified categories, thumbnails, etc
• In Post Ads – use this to… you guessed it, insert ads into posts
• Google XML Sitemaps – Obvious
• All In One Event Calendar – The best one I found, it also comes with a sidebar widget that displays upcoming events
• Akismet – I doubt I had to list this, but hopefully everyone uses this anyway

* Update: Digg Digg was replaced with AddToAny because B Scott wanted Tumblr which Digg Digg did not have.