There seems to be quite the bag of tricks that went into building David Henry Sterry’s new site. Well, there is, but I’ll tell you what’s inside.

The more I use WOO Canvas, the more I think, “Well, that wasn’t so complicated.” With a smart collection of powerful and reliable plugins and Canvas’s own overflowing chest of power tools, what might look like a complicated and technical site didn’t have a smidgen of code … unless you count the RGB color numbers for the semi-transparent background for the content. (Update: and the bit to get the search bar into the nav.)

[box type=”info”]Did we customize this site so much that it’ll be rendered useless at the next WordPress upgrade? Uh, no. [/box]

The video walks you through the steps and here’s a list of tricks and plugins used in David Henry Sterry’s wizbang new site:

  • Justified Image Grid: posts in a grid just like Pinterest or Flickr. Add featured image to your posts, it’s ready.
  • Background Manager: a powerful background tool that lets you have multiple sets of images for different pages on your site. Easy to work with. Unbelievable that it’s free.
  • Semi-transparent backgrounds: check out #8 on WOO Canvas CSS Tweaks: Semi-Transparent Colors in WOO Canvas Elements. You can do wonders just knowing this little bit of CSS trickery.
  • Business Slider Template: a WOO Canvas standard, but it all depends on the photos you use.
  • WOO Tabs: these are always a favorite … especially if you have popular content with great imagery.
  • Search bar in main navigation: yup, a little code in the right place and your search bar is out of your way–but useful.

Check out davidhenrysterry.com to see for yourself what Canvas, a few plugins, and some wild photography can do.

There's a bag of tricks that went into building this site. But they're not secret.

There’s a bag of tricks that went into building this site. But they’re not secret.