Published on by Devin Reams
Working with the great folks at Crispin Porter + Bogusky we acted quickly to launch a single-serving WordPress blog for a new Domino's marketing campaign. The Pizza Turnaround site acts as a showcase explaining Domino's latest recipe change. The blog features recent media mentions, documentary videos, and commentary from individuals on Twitter. We handled the WordPress development and assisted with deployment and scaling.
Twitter commentary
The sidebar on every page of the site shows the latest commentary from Twitter for Domino's new pizza. Using the Twitter Search API we built an extension for our Twitter Tools plugin that shows the latest tweets with the #newpizza hashtag as sidebar widget. The list of tweets can be expanded on the front-end using AJAX (no page refresh), and the number of tweets to show in the widget is an editorially controlled setting on the back end.
Scalable isn't easy
To prepare the site for as many visitors as possible we extended the theme to use a third-party CDN to serve images, JavaScript, and CSS files. We also helped set up the site to allow caching across multiple cloud server instances.
Design implementation
We can't take credit for the look of the site, that was left to the marketing experts at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. But, once they handed us the layered design files, we quickly built a full WordPress theme in semantic markup and CSS using the Carrington theme framework.
Social media and metrics integration
We integrated several social media components by leveraging APIs from Facebook, Twitter, and AddThis. We then used advanced JavaScript APIs to add advanced event tracking metrics throughout the site so these efforts can be monitored.
Facebook Connect for comments
Using the Facebook Connect platform, users can easily authenticate and leave verified comments on posts. The ability to Connect with Facebook is offered as an enhancement to standard WordPress commenting.
Mobile version
Using the Carrington Mobile theme, we simply dropped the theme and WordPress Mobile Edition plugin into the site. From there, a few CSS tweaks were made and instantly, a mobile version of the blog was available for smartphone users (with the option to view the non-mobile site, as well).
Design and concept by CP+B
