Sam Brown

Your Guide to the City at WooThemes

#421 18th March 2010 at 4am Link 8 Comments

City Guide is a WordPress theme I designed for the fantastic people at WooThemes.

We’ve developed this theme to cater for directory-based wordpress sites. For example, a guide to a city with shops, restaurants and other places of interest all archived in posts with geo-tags and custom content about the locations.

I was approached by the WooThemes Team late last year to design a new theme for them that was a going to be aimed at a niche market instead of the typical blog and magazine themes. The brief was to design a theme that allows one to best publish listings/ratings of attractions in a city and plot them on a map via the Google Maps API. A location-based directory that anyone can morph into something of their own for their local area, town or city.

It was a fun process working together, there was a lot of freedom and some fantastic concise feedback from the team. While I only provided flat PSD mockups the folks at Woo have done a good job bringing it to life and integrating it into their system for you.

If you fancy getting your hands on a copy of this theme you can get a rather generous 20% discount with the coupon code SAMBROWN for the next 2 weeks. Thanks to Woo.

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Comments

kat neville 18 March 2010, 04:32 #1

Looks fantastic Sam! I love the illustration too. I saw your name in an ad on my tweetie feed, and wondered what you were up to. Anyway, great work, and interesting new project for you!

Ben Bodien 18 March 2010, 05:34 #2

Great work as usual, Sam. Looking forward to finding sites using this theme when I’m looking for new cities to explore.

I really like the background across the map section. Kind of like Canabalt!

Keith 18 March 2010, 06:09 #3

Looks good, Sam. Who knows, somebody might use it to make a real guide to our city. I had to laugh at one of the news items in the mock-up, “Heat wave hits Edinburgh”. Yeah, I wish!

Mark McCorkell 19 March 2010, 01:13 #4

Lovely design! The header is what got my attention. I love the graphic style and the little block edged clouds. It has a really nice soft colour palette too – gorgeous stuff on quite a few levels, good sir!

Jone 21 March 2010, 07:58 #5

Well, I bought it – the THEME is great! but the WOOTHEMES should fix their LOGIN – I am not able to login to download the PDF USER GUIDE – no respond/feedback from them… irritating!

Sam Brown 22 March 2010, 04:32 #6

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

@Jone Unfortunately I have no control over that side of things but have left a message with WooThemes to look into that for you.

Mikey Leung 23 March 2010, 23:17 #7

Hey Sam,

Mikey here. I’m an author with Bradt Travel Guides and have published a book to Bangladesh.

I really like your theme and I have yet to try it out yet but it might not be something that suits my needs perfectly. I’m wondering is there special templates inside the theme to differentiate between listings and attractions? I could see the information being presented slightly differently for each item.

And also what bugs me is Wordpress’ insistence that every single item is a post entry. So that would mean that to use your theme properly, each hotel, bar or restaurant would be its own post?

There must be a more effective way of collecting, entering and then displaying this information. I don’t know if you have time to develop this theme any further but I’m really interested in what it could do.

I also have loads of guidebook information that I want to publish, but haven’t yet also figured out how to monetise this publication process either! Thanks for all your hard work for this. If you have a moment I’d love to hear what you think of my current site, also based on a WooTheme.

Cheers,
-Mikey

Rogie King 2 April 2010, 08:19 #8

Sam, beautiful work! Every time I see your work, it pushes me forward into not creating the same-old mundane designs. I love that you challenge me as a designer.

Thanks for contributing great stuff to the interwebs.

Your friend,
Rogie

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Hi, I'm a UI designer developer based in Edinburgh Scotland working as lead web designer at foursquare in NY.

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