After nearly a month of work, the new vizualrecords.com is up. To say that getting the site completed and integrating the store was a bit of a challenge would be an understatement.

At the beginning of the whole process, I was only vaguely familiar with CSS and did not know a lick of PHP, let alone how to create a custom WordPress theme. I wanted to learn all of those things so I thought doing a complete redesign of my label’s site would be the best way. Now, I have a few new skills in my arsenal and a site I’m really proud of.

There were a lot of twists and turns along the way, but there are so many resources online now and just about any issue you’ve run into, someone has dealt with it before and figured out a solution. I also have to give credit to Ian Stewart’s Themeshaper site for his excellent tutorials on making a custom child theme using his Thematic Theme Framework. There’s a lot of really active and helpful people on the Themeshaper forums as well.

The main challenges were with integrating the shopping cart using the wp e-commerce WordPress plugin. I had it working on the previous Vizual Records site at vizualized.com, but there were additional challenges with getting the shopping cart working with the custom theme I was using. Even as a paid Gold Cart user of the plugin, you are pretty much left to your own devices as the forums can’t always provide an answer. I found that getting creative with my search terms on the forums and a healthy dose of patience went a long way. The plugin is very robust and future versions will only improve. For now I think wpec is the best option and allows you to completely customize the look and feel of your online store.

It’s pretty amazing that I can make a track, upload it to my site and have it for sale within minutes of it being complete. I don’t think that was possible even a short time ago. I’m excited to explore the possibilities.

Check out the site and store today: http://www.vizualrecords.com/