Nile Street Multimedia

Nile Street Multimedia Blog

Aboto site to WordPress

We have been convinced for some time now that WordPress makes content management super easy. WordPress also has such an array an array of plugins that adding a range of additional features becomes easy and very cost effective.

These benefits were enough to get Aboto, one of our clients to get us to rebuild their site maintaining exactly the same look but within a WordPress framework. I think this demonstrates that using WordPress does not in way limit our ability to create the overall look required by the client.

These two shots are before WordPress and after WordPress.

Original Aboto Site
Original Aboto Site
New Abot Site
New Abot Site

LearnDash as an LMS

LearnDash is a Learning Management Plugin for WordPress. We have developed a few sites with it at it and think that there will be clients where this might be a nice tidy solution.

Maybe you would not to replace a full blown LMS, but if you have a WordPress site and you want to be able to provide online training courses for your staff or to have courses for sale to the general public then LearnDash might well be for you. It does have an easy integration of payment gateways so that selling online becomes relatively easy.

LearnDash does have the ability to load Storyline course material and if the Storyline course has been published to Tin Can API then the Storyline’s results can be sent to a LRS. We are continually doing investigation into how well this works but it seems to be a great way to integrate Storyline or Rise.

Stay tuned as we investigate this further or contact us if you have a project that you think might fit the WordPress/LearnDash/Storyline model.

Rapid Course Changes with Storyline

There is a huge benefit from using Articulate Storyline for online course development. On one hand the course can be used to output both Flash and html5 versions of the same thing including video, interactivity, quizzes and results and on the other hand the program allows quick changes to content allowing revised courses to be available in a matter of minutes.

When we were deciding on the right development platform we looked closely at a few options that ultimately came down to the choice between Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline. Both had pros and cons but we feel we made the correct choice with Storyline.

Since using Storyline one of the big pluses has been the support for this product. The forums are great with a good team of supporters and also the support from Articulate has been excellent. When there have been issues that nobody has been able to make sense of we have been able to upload our project and get one of the Storyline experts to have a look at it.

Coast Lines

cl_screen1A free, monthly Goolwa-Victor Harbor community magazine distributed across the Fleurieu Peninsula and to Kangaroo Island.

A critical part of this site was for the Coast Lines team to be able to easily add new stories and information. We used WordPress for back-end content management with various plugins to get the effects they wanted.

One effect that was important to them was the ability to schedule content to appear and disappear from the site based on date and time. This means a considerable amount of work can be planned ahead of time.

“Regrettably, we joined the queue with those who had an unfortunate experience with someone who was going to deliver the world with a new website. The cost said we should have got the world. Of course, it didn’t work out, and someone recommended that we start from scratch again with Drew at Nile Street Media. Something was terribly wrong here; he communicated in simple terms; and used phrases like ‘this may be more economical for you’ and ‘may I suggest…’ There had to be a catch. Not so; the final product was brilliant. Drew delivered what our business needed and well within our budget restraints. We have since had people ask us whom we used for our website, and we have been proud to say Drew from Nile Street Media” Ashley & Jenny Porter, Coast Lines magazine

WordPress for this site

For quite some time we have been using WordPress for our site development, but we never got around to revising the Nile Street Multimedia site into this platform.

When WordPress came out with the TwentyTwelve theme I thought maybe now is the time to take our site and translate the existing look into a WordPress site using TwentyTwelve as a base. I still basically liked the look of the existing site so it was rather just a case of rebuilding the back-end.

One thing about TwentyTwelve is that it is very much designed to work across a range of devices rather than being a theme that is designed for a desktop and then tweaked for mobile and tablets as an afterthought. This made it pretty easy to create a good mobile solution.

Across the board I’m pretty happy with TwentyTwelve as a basis for building a theme. TwentyEleven is too complex to use as a base for building a theme although it is great as simple site that pretty much uses the theme out of the box. I think it is time to retire TwentyTen which has been my favorite for starting a new development.

Many thanks to Jeannie Wilksch at Cultivate Design for revising the header images.