The Reason I Adore Working With Wordpress

Wordpress is my canvass.

It’s the content management system that almost all of the micro business owners I know use to run their website. I’ve been activating the web essence of women entrepreneurs for over three years now.

One of my very best friends, Jac McNeil, wanted to add new design elements to her site.

She enlisted the talent of artist for entrepreneurs Lisa McLoughlin to create personalized images for her new design.

Customizing a premium theme like the one I use (Thesis) gives me the flexibility to be able to make subtle or huge changes to your overall site design without having to start from scratch with customizing and coding something completely new. Translation: minimal coding time thus minimal investment for a beautiful new look for your online home.

What did we do?

Here’s what we started with:

After only two hours of Jac’s site being in maintenance mode, here’s what we did:

And her inner pages:

Part of the reason this was such an easy job for me was that Jac knew what she wanted. She spent time working with Lisa creating the visuals that would make her brand feel even more like her. Together, we went over her Google Analytics to see the patterns that her website visitors had been taking in the last year. From this we were able to make some strategic decisions that will help Jac with her web goal and content flow:

• adding content in the form of copy to her home page to start gaining some SEO
• changing the placement of her blog posts to encourage more visits
• changing the names of some of her navigation links to be more clear
• increasing the width of her sidebar
• changing the color of her headings to better reflect her new color palette
• swapping out her old graphics and images for her new customized ones
• leveraging Linked In as a social media avenue
• creating a place where she can promote her digital offerings like the incredible Solopreneur Sojourn
• optimizing her newsletter sign up with a brand new offering, “5 Key Principles for Owning Your Personal Power”
• creating a new Facebook cover page that reflects her new visual direction

If Jac wasn’t using Wordpress or Thesis as a theme, the work for me would have been much more.

The main reasons I adore working with Wordpress are flexibility and ease of iteration — for both web designer and client.