Around the Office: Patternizer Backgrounds, Shopp E-Commerce, Marketing as Storytelling, and More!

Building an e-commerce WordPress website? Savvy developer Scott recommends the Shopp plugin, which he decided to use partly because it works, and partly because of the depth of documentation for both developers and users. After all, we prefer plugins that we can figure out how to customize easily. And our clients appreciate having something they can use more easily.Designer Eva played with Patternizer to create some nifty CSS 3 website backgrounds. The Patternizer web app lets you create custom parallel line patterns, plaids, and argyle designs, and provides the custom CSS to add these designs to a website. Using creativity and play, designers can focus on coming up with complicated and stunning work – exactly what you expect from Eva!

Storytelling isn’t just for bedtime! Caroline was happy to read Phil Johnson’s defense of narrative in marketing. He writes, “the hottest trend in marketing today just might be the ancient art of storytelling.” Perhaps marketers should be looking to the likes of Stephen King and Flannery O’Connor to better their craft.

Sometimes you want to change the style of certain areas of pages. At Arley McBlain’s session at the Toronto WordCamp Developers conference, Daveed got a great overview of Scoped CSS, which lets developers specify local styles within specific elements on a page. While Scoped CSS has its opponents, it’s an interesting tool to give specific elements styles other than the global ones.