PHEA, as we call it in the office (any title that long needs a TLA, even if it’s a FLA) is run by a former colleague of mine from Runner’s World, Alisa Bowman, and it’s WordPress at the core. Beyond that core, however, PHEA uses several plugins, a custom page configuration, and a very custom theme. Wrangling all those players became our job, with the primary goal of shifting the theme from a three-column layout which left the content column too narrow for embedded video to a two-column layout. The result is easier to read and places the reading focus where it belongs: on Alisa’s columns, not on the sidebar material.

We’d love to claim credit for this, but actually Alisa is that rare and delightful client who knew exactly what she wanted; she just didn’t know how to make it happen. We demonstrated potential changes on a staging installation on one of our servers, and when they were approved, used Subversion to push theme changes out to the live site.

We have a lot of respect for WordPress as a lightweight publishing system which is easy for non-technical users to pick up, but PHEA demonstrates that for users with a clear idea of their site’s function and the patience to try a few different options, it can also be a powerful tool for creating a rich site which is worlds apart from a cookie-cutter blog.