Integrating Blogs and Existing Websites: Reuse Existing Site CSS

Background

I recently helped a California web design firm help their client establish and integrate WordPress blogs into their existing site, which the firm was redesigning for them. In other words, everything was changing all at once! It’s too early to reveal their identities, but I can provide a general overview of what was needed and how we worked together to get the job done. One interesting fact about this gig is that I was discovered via LinkedIn.

The Client’s Client

The web design and marketing firm’s client is an IT services company that provides managed IT solutions for business. They have a podcast and wanted several blogs, plus a central “media center” kind of site or blog with RSS feeds and links to the other blogs — like a hub. They had some requirements for using includes in the WordPress theme so that they could modify top and bottom navigation bars in one place centrally.

Custom WordPress Theme Based on Existing CSS

So I built them a custom WordPress theme that referenced the stylesheets for the newly redesigned main site. I renamed the ids to match those used by the main site page structure and created styles for those WordPress-specific items not found in the main site’s CSS. For those of you who either design WordPress themes yourself, or for those of you who are considering how to integrate blogs and existing business sites together, I think that using the main site’s existing CSS as much as possible saves a lot of time, bandwidth, and headaches down the road. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. In this case, I also needed to create some styles in the head portion of the index.php file that override certain styles properties from the main stylesheet, where necessary.

If the company at some point in the future wants to change the colors of all the links, for example, changing their main site’s CSS will be sufficient to also change it in the blog without any additional effort.

The Process

I communicated with the web design/marketing firm via email only. My contact person was exceptional: she clearly communicated requirements (having been on that side of the situation herself many times) and understood what it takes to do this sort of work. She and they just weren’t familiar enough with WordPress’ themes, template tags, and plugins to make a go of it on their own, so they hired me. Working 3-4 hours a night, the major deliverables were hammered out in almost a week, with a revisit after a scope change afterwards. They paid me day-by-day via PayPal after I submitted my hours.

The Results

All in all, it was a very successful project, and shows how integrating a blog into an existing website need not be too complicated or take a long time to accomplish.