As their blog web site states "IT Buzz was created to bring together the 'techy geeks' and business minded technology lovers, providing an open forum to share the news, knowledge, advice and expertise of the IT industry in one location."



The site was designed by Terry Montag of Quartremaine Design for Compugen Inc., one of Canada's largest IT services providers and systems integrators.

Click here to view the features of the mobile version, also designed by Terry.

We used the Wordpress CMS (Content Management System) platform. One challenge was to create a custom Wordpress theme so that the web site would incorporate a structure and layout designed specifically for the client. Another challenge was to create and implement several special functional features that the client requested. And the site is scalable so that more features can be added over time, as deemed desirable by feedback from the site's visitors and authors.

The home page was built to display excerpts of the eight most recent blogs posted, using 3 different sizes, as shown in the image below. Then at the client's request we made all blog excerpts be the same size, and added pagination so the visitor could view older blog excerpts from the Home page.

I created a custom setup for displaying advertising, without the need for a third-party plugin. The ads are easily controlled by the Administrator in the Wordpress Dashboard. Every time a page loads, the banner ad will randomly display one of any number of versions that are added by the Administrator to that banner ad's page in the Wordpress Dashboard. The ad click throughs are, of course, tracked by Google Analytics.

Content on some pages comes from pages created and edited by the Administrator in the Dashboard, combined with content dynamically generated in custom templates.

I created custom code for the sidebar to display the six top authors' names, photos, and link to their individual Author page, determined by who has published the most posts on the web site.

The Authors page is custom coded to list the categories each author has written about.

Because tech jargon can be confusing even to the professionals, when the visitor mouses over a category in the Categories page, a definition or description is displayed.

And stale tweets will never be displayed. Custom code determines that if there are less than three tweets available within the last eight days, the "Latest Tweets" section in the sidebar is not displayed.

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