Since one of my favourite activities is creating new WordPress sites, I was thrilled when Sharon Graham asked me to develop a new blog for Career Professionals of Canada (CPC).

The project presented me with some unique challenges, as the blog needed to match the look and feel of the CPC website as much as possible, and we needed a way for non-registered users to submit job postings and events for career practitioners. In addition, Sharon had some very specific requirements around the way the information is presented, which could not be accomplished by using standard WordPress widgets.

For the design, I decided to start with the iThemes Builder theme. Although I’d been using Headway as the basis for my recent custom designs, including this blog, I’d enjoyed working with some of iThemes‘ other premium themes and was eager to put Builder to the test. In some ways I like Headway better, but in other ways I prefer Builder, and I’ll share my detailed comparison in a future post.

For the forms, we decided to go with Gravity Forms, which is the most powerful and user-friendly contact form plug-in I’ve ever worked with, even better than Contact Form 7, which I’ve always found to be quite good.

To accommodate the other requests, I found some other plug-ins that did the trick quite nicely, but I can’t give away all my secrets now, can I?

If you are a career professional, especially a Canadian one, you will want to subscribe to the CPC blog and receive expert advice for you and your clients and up-to-date industry information, including career opportunities.