We’ve been working on this site a lot, getting it all spruced up for the tour, which starts in just a few weeks (we’re at the no-sleep-too-busy-working stage right now) and I thought I would take a minute to update the blogosphere on what we’re using to drive this site along.

The Bones

The bones of the site are wordpress. We host it on our own domain through bluehost.com. This gives us a really solid base to build on. I read somewhere recently that wordpress now drives 15% of the web’s most visited sites. That’s quite an achievement, and if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us too!

The Look

The bones aren’t enough all on their own, though. You have to have to bring the content out where people can find it too, and so we do – using a great theme called “Arthemia Premium” from Michael Hatugalang of Colorlabs. The Colorlabs team have been very responsive in handling requests, and we’re grateful to them for the excellent support they’ve provided over the last 2 years. I can say good things about a lot of support organizations, but here’s the difference with these guys: I emailed them, and they solved the problem within an hour! Not just that, but when they made a mistake (as is bound to happen from time to time) they admitted it immediately, and fixed things – no egos in the way, no passing the buck, no ignoring the problem. I’m impressed.

The Peripherals

Once you have a good looking, workable site, you need to give it the features that you want. I won’t list all of them, but here are some of the key plugins/widgets/thingymajiggers that we use to keep the site rolling smoothly:

• WP-Page-Navi is a great plugin that makes navigating wordpress much better than it is out of the box. It handles a lot of the navigation stuff that makes the difference between the site navigation feeling forced and working really well.
• WP-prettyPhoto is another plugin that I like. It makes the amazing photographs of the Maasai really stand out on the site. We embed them in the blog, and when you click on them, they pop up into a beautiful lightbox. You can try it out on this picture here. Update: turns out this plugin broke with the installation of WordPress 3.1. I spent hours looking for a solution and finally located this link which included a hack to get it back working. It’s a testament to this plugin just how much time I’ll spend keeping it working!
• Twitter Widget Pro handles the twitter feed you see in the right column of each page, and it does it nicely. As we have time, we’ll improve our css styling of it and it’ll look even better. Great plugin!
• Social is a new (right now) plugin that has amazing potential to harness our social networks. The En-kata project has hundreds of followers on Facebook, but getting that community to contribute their input here on the website is a challenge… until Social came along. Social will integrate what people are saying on Twitter and Facebook onto the site. Again, as with the Twitter widget, we’ve got some implementation work to do here, but wait for it – it’s gonna be great!
• MailChimp  is what we use to let you connect with us via email. We had tried another, more generic plugin first, but it didn’t speak well with MailChimp (worked, but didn’t give us feedback), so instead we’ve gone with the MailChimp/Automattic developed plugin.
• Google Analyticator analyticates the site. Um yeah. It lets us use Google’s wonderful Analytics service to find out where our visitors are coming from, what browsers they’re using, and what they’re reading – all of which is very useful in keeping the site relevant. Odd note: we seem to get a very random and very high number of visits because of people searching for the words “Elephant Feet”. Weird!
• Ajax Event Calendar is what we use to tell you about our events. It shows them nicely and lets us manage them well. I wish it tied in with Facebook Events, but for now it’s the best we’ve found.
• 1-CLick Retweet/Share/Like is an awkward name for a plugin that does what it does well, which is, it lets you tell your friends about content you like on the site. So do it! (Please?)

Summary

So there you have it – the key parts of En-kata’s web presence. We perhaps should also mention 2Co and Paypal, which handle our sales through the site. Oh, and it’s definitely worth mentioning that this redesign has been helped tremendously by Erynn Saunders of SpeakEasyDesign.ca and HolyCowCom.com. Hire him to do great work for you too!

As for me? Other than working on the tour, I’m keeping busy with the Pamoja Ministries website redesign… you’ll see more of that soon. Now, before you go, skip on over and buy a copy of the photobook! (Please – it supports education in Maasailand!)