A “No Maintenance Mode” Redesign

One of the organizations that I work with recently had a new logo developed. The logo was clean and well designed, but looked terrible with the old style sheet. The design of the entire site was suddenly all wrong: the menu looked too heavy, the headers looked too pink and all the colour values felt several shades off.

It was an unpleasant discovery and the organization needed an instant fix. What could be done in a day or two without putting the whole site on maintenance mode?

As anyone running a site on WordPress has already discovered, content management systems like WordPress don’t really allow the developer to do a whole lot of covert backend work. Any saved changes that you make on the back end will immediately show on the user end. A Dreamweaver-based site is a lot more forgiving in this way, as it allows the designer to make all the changes on his or her own computer and upload them as one file that overwrites the original.

But if the revisions that you need to make to your WordPress site can all be accomplished with the development of a new style sheet, then you’re in luck. As long as the underlying functionality and layout of your site can remain unaltered, you have the freedom to transform your WordPress site without ever putting it on maintenance mode.

The application that you will need to do this work is CSS Edit from Mac Rabbit. CSS Edit lets you import an existing style sheet to your computer and edit it without ever touching the live code. You can play with colour values, you can change background graphics, and you can tweak the general layout without having to permanently commit to any of the changes that you’re trying out. I use CSS Edit along with Chrome’s Developer Tools, which I find help me isolate an element in the code with more precision than CSS Edit’s x-ray function. CSS Edit’s preview function overwrites the style sheet on the live site but leaves the original file unaltered. You can save your new style sheet to your computer and work on it at your leisure, then upload it to the server to replace the old style sheet once you’re happy with all the changes.

If you do need to revise the PHP code, then maintenance mode may be a necessarily evil. But if you just need to change the CSS, you can easily prepare and preview a new style sheet in CSS Edit and upload your masterpiece only once it’s ready.