Building an Empire with PressWork

What’s Empire Avenue?

Empire Avenue is the Social Stock Market, where you can Grow your Social Capital online. Here’s how it works, you get to discover valuable, interesting, cool, fun people online and then based scores or share price, invest virtual currency in their profiles by buying shares in our Social Stock Market. It’s boatloads of fun, and that simple act of buying shares in someone you think is worth your currency, you will create new connections and as people invest in you, grow your own social capital and get more value in and out of your networks!

Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Aaron K. White, Director of Design & Interactive Development at Empire Avenue, over twitter after seeing some tweets about Empire Avenue switching their blog over to PressWork. It’s always exciting to see what people are doing with our work and it’s even better when it’s a fellow Canadian Startup.

Make sure to check out Empire Avenue and get your social stock growing!

Here’s a few questions we asked Aaron about Empire Avenue’s experience with PressWork.

How long did it take for you to get PW set up and looking the way you wanted it to?

The initial installation was a breeze and once we decided to use a child theme; you know the proper way to do things, we had a fully customized theme to match our landing page within 30 minutes. This included our logo, a custom background, font-combinations and updating the default colors.

What was the most difficult issue you encountered working with PW?

Deciding on the best way to implement the framework. Usually we would grab an existing WordPress framework and hack on the code until we had a useable blog site. We tried a couple different versions before deciding to take full advantage of PressWork and all it’s wonderful out of the box features. We were pleasantly surprised by how unbelievably easy PressWork was to customize.

What features would you like to see in future releases of PW?

One feature we would like to see is the ability to visually manage the layout of the front page and the post page separately from the PressWork admin widget. It would be really nice to have this level of control without writing too much custom code.

Did you have a chance to play around with the custom action hooks?

We did not take advantage of the custom hooks, however are planning on utilizing them in the near future to enhance our Blog.