etsy mini slot
December 9th, 2011

Making a New Website Using Apostrophe

Dana Vachon
With the launch of hosted Apostrophe, all of us at P'unk Ave have been buzzing with excitement. However, I'd like to claim, that I am the MOST excited. Usually in the project manager role around here, I'm the only person with no design or programming experience. I have all these ideas for websites, and no way to execute them without bribing my developer friends with baked goods. Until now. 
 
Last week we released an Etsy Mini slot in Apostrophe. This got me thinking about all my friends who are Etsy sellers, and do not have their own websites. I asked my friend Diane if I could use her Etsy store as an example to build her a website. She sent me her Etsy Mini code, and I took off running. 
 
You can see the completed site here:  Cutesy But Not Cutesy
 
The cool thing about using Apostrophe is the feeling of control. For example, on the home page there are two different content areas. A banner area for full width content, and the body area for two column content (this is in all the themes). You can make a page that only has content spanning the full width of the page, content with two columns of goodness, or a combination of both.
 
I chose to start with the Georgia theme. I decided to put her Etsy store front and center in the banner slot. Already I was making a site that looked unique. 

Then I decided to be a little adventurous and see if I could change the background color. Right now, to change a background you have to use the CSS editor. I picked a blue, found it's hex value, searched the CSS editor for the background color and swapped the yellow out for the blue. Now, I was really on a roll. 

css editor
Diane has a YouTube account for her business. Using the Linked Accounts feature, I was able to have all her YouTube videos automatically sync up with her website. All I had to do was enter in her username, and it populated the media library.
media  linked accounts
linked accounts
Now it was time to copy over some over her blog posts. Using the blog tool, I copied over the content from her existing blog. I added the images to the media library, and selected videos from YouTube. A really great feature of Apostrophe is being able to put blog posts anywhere! I wanted some of the more recent ones to populated the homepage, so I used the blog slot to pull them in. 
 
By categorizing the blog posts, I can be selective about which ones automatically populate the homepage. I only want recent news posts on the homepage, and everything else can live on the blog page. 
blog slot
As a non-technical person, I was very proud of the site I was able to build by myself. I actually enjoyed building the website! Apostrophe took out all the frustrating points, and just let me have fun. Not to mention, it didn't take very long. 
 
Give Apostrophe a try, we'd love to hear your feedback. All questions, comments and concerns are welcome.
Check out another article
December 8th, 2011
Apostrophe People Plugin!
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