Overview
The Plaza Group is a real estate agency in Orange County, CA. They already had an HTML website that they liked, but needed a gallery to display properties that would be user friendly enough to manage content additions in house, for displaying property specific information (videos, interior/exterior pics, floor plans, etc.).
Project
I was brought in to come up with a gallery solution so they could keep their existing website but still have the features of a content management system. For this I developed a site using WordPress, and a third party supported, heavily documented, mobile friendly theme (to reduce their reliance contracting developers). Using this combination of tools gives them an easy to maintain site where content can be added without coding knowledge. The overall design was created to mimic their current website, with the WordPress installation being installed in a subfolder, allowing the website to be on the main domain giving the impression to the user that they are still on the main website.
One hurdle that I had to figure out was that the host for the current site was on a Media Temple shared account, which used MySQL 5.1 (an older version), which lacks support for utf8mb4. Luckily I was able to use WP Migrate DB to change all of the tables from utf8 from utf8mb4, that way we were able to still use Media Temple shared hosting without getting DB errors.
