PortsmouthNH.com

WordPress theme for a popular tourism site

Design by First Tracks Marketing

PortsmouthNH.com is a popular site featuring many listings for local businesses, community events, movies, and a seasonal photo contest. Although it regularly receives around 500,000 hits a month in its peak during the summer, the look and feel of the site and its underlying technology had not been updated since the early 2000s. The site needed both a fresh look and an easier way to manage the content. This site was much like an iceberg in that much of the work happened in the back-end in the form of data migration and cleanup. Hundreds of listings and thousands of photos were brought over from Access databases into the WordPress database. The site also included integration with many 3rd party sites and services such as Google ads, Google Maps, weather, movie listings, movie ticket purchases, and lodging reservations. The site is built for expansion and includes ease of use features such as event and photo submissions which go directly into the WordPress database for easy review and publishing. The home page is broken out into blocks which are easily customized to pull from different areas of the site using custom shortcodes written just for the site.

Home page blocks are easily changed and each block has content specified by custom shortcodes so that content remains fresh.

 

The site uses Modern Tribe’s Event Calendar plugin with not only heavily modified styles, but also custom filtering. The main events list excludes certain categories and custom filtering options are presented on the left side of the page.
The site uses Modern Tribe’s Event Calendar plugin with not only heavily modified styles, but also custom filtering. The main events list excludes certain categories and custom filtering options are presented on the left side of the page.

 

One of the site’s popular features is movie listings. These listings are retrieved via FTP and loaded into the database each day. A custom JSON file is then created to hold listings and avoid extra database calls.
One of the site’s popular features is movie listings. These listings are retrieved via FTP and loaded into the database each day. A custom JSON file is then created to hold listings and avoid extra database calls.

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