Hang on to your full content news feeds, this post might be a long one. I hope to try and document the under the hood as well as some of the exterior chrome work on a new site NMC just unveiled this week. This is as much for my records as anything.

But first, start with the demo, the final piece. The new site is for NMC Virtual Worlds, our new arm that provides consulting and buolding expertise in Virtual Worlds, right now focused n (but not forever) Second Life. Take a peek first at http://virtualworlds.nmc.org/ which looks almost like:

if you reload the front page, the banners as well as the case study in the lower right will change. The banner rotation is easy, something I’ve already put into the other WP power site, the NMC Campus Observer.

The needs for the site were provided rather simply as a Word document, with 6 of the present 7 major tabs. It was presented as primarily static content, but they left me room to dynamic it up, toss in some randomized aspects as well as use syndicated content. Actually, they left most of the decisions up to me, and someone else took care of the text writing (they know of my poor typing skills). I envisioned having some regularly published “news” via the blog page type, but most of the content would be static (or semi-static) WordPress “Pages” (capital P). I was also provided a logo, which gives some direction on important colors.

So the first step was looking for a template to use as a starting point.