The BlueBox website created in 2003 uses normal static HTML pages. After I told them about WordPress, they were interested to change but they did not have sufficient skills in XHTML and CSS. I told them that was not a problem and I would help them all the way.

They would like to have a clean, simple but classy website. Since the name of the company is BlueBox this implied both blue and boxes. I actually used their old blue box design from the current website because I thought it was already very classy.

I started by adding reflection to their original logo to make an interesting banner for their new website. Then I designed the page layout. It took only 2 attempts before they agreed the layout and a few more iterations to settle on the colour theme. I took their existing content to create the design pages. I like to see all the pages in the new design before I start coding as it is less hassle in the implementation phase. While I was busy with the design, Beaver, my friend who is one of the co-founders of BlueBox, downloaded and installed WordPress on his PC to get familiar with the product before we implement it. Beaver would like to learn more about CSS and XHTML as well and took this as an opportunity to learn it by doing something useful for his company at the same time.

When it came to the implementation, I started off as usual by implementing the static pages first. Before I implemented the BlueBox website I read the book called Bulletproof of web design written by Dan Cederholm which made me aware of a lot of things which I was not when I implemented Romtex and XP-Link. In the BlueBox design I used tabs as a navigator. To make it more bulletproof I used the technique called Sliding door of CSS and Sliding door of CSS, Part II. These 2 articles are well-described by Douglas Bowman published at A List Apart.

To implement the website for BlueBox, it was not too difficult when I used my own Linux hosting. I finished the implementation one week after I completed the design. However Bluebox web hosting is windows based with IIS as the web server, and this was much more problematic than using Linux. The main problem one more was the permalinks because using pretty permalinks needs mod_rewrite. We finally achieved what we wanted by using Wordpress Remove Index.php plugin.

Another challenge was the website language. BlueBox present their website in both Thai and English. I could not find any plugin that suited our requirements, so Beaver had to code some PHP to handle that.