When Doing Your Own Redesign Takes A Long Time

When Doing Your Own Redesign Takes A Long Time

We’ve all been there. Some of us more than others – yet still the idea of a redesign initially starts out with great aspirations, then leads to feverish or lackluster enthusiasm weeks later. Let me back up and explain my story.

It’s been probably three or four years since our last redesign of the Design Theory Website. Years ago I can remember when I first tried WordPress and had a blog in a sub-domain while having our main website in HTML on the root. It worked out better than I could have expected and within about nine months I was ready to convert everything into one site on WordPress.

Fast forward to present day, and I can honestly say that I’ve been working on this redesign for about two months. Not consistently, more on-and-off. Reason being is that, well, we’ve been busy. Being busy is a good thing when you’re a creative but only to a certain point. Some of our best ideas get filtered into our client websites and strategy efforts, meanwhile our own website gets the cold shoulder.

Why Are We Taking So Long

To be honest and short, we want a really good and clean experience for you. We want all of our services laid out in a way that is easier to navigate, lead/sales funnels created with purpose, and products easier to identify and purchase. What we’ve learned over the years is that the customer experience is what matters the most in any website. It kind of needs to be catered to them more so than what I think the website should be designed like.

Another reason for the redesign is to make the new website load much faster than the current one does. Realizing that more web traffic is done via mobile browsers than desktops, we have to make sure that our website loads smooth and fast on hand-held devices. Make sure that it’s also Google Mobile Friendly is key too. It’s important to make sure that the almighty Google deems our website acceptable.

Lastly, we believe it’s time for a refresh. There are a lot of ideas that we want to do that include a rebrand, but we’re going to have to hold off on some of those bigger and more time intensive initiatives to be able to focus on tangible goals and a timeline. Good ideas are great but they’re truly a dime a dozen. It’s really about executing and to be able to launch some of our more necessary ideas we have to stay focused. When it comes to our customer redesigns we treat them the same. We come up with a lot of great ideas from improved functionality, new software, and new graphics, but we also stage things out in milestones so that there is always something to look forward to over the next several weeks and months.

As you can see we’ve got a lot to consider with our redesign. It’s more important to us that it’s done right than just putting together a new design and layout without constructive though behind it for usability. Have you been thinking about a redesign of your website? What is holding you back from getting started? Let us know in the comments below or contact us directly if we can help.

Some Great Apps & Tools For Managing Your WordPress Site On The Go

If you’re like me, you’re almost always on your smartphone or have your device in a close reach. It’s not because I want to look busy all the time, but that there are a lot of things that are happening online from social media posts, website metrics, responses to blog posts, and content creation to name a few.

I came across this post from WPMU Dev that highlights quite a few of the apps and tools I use as well as a bunch more including:

  • Buffer
  • SimpleNote
  • PingDom
  • Google Analytics
  • MailChimp

Top Tools for Managing Your WordPress Site With Your Mobile Phone

by Brenda Barron

Make Life Easy WP Plugins

If you’re a web designer or blogger, you know that WordPress (WP) has quickly become one of the fastest growing, most popular content management systems (CMS) around.  It’s extremely quick to install as well as easy to navigate and master.  And they are consistently evolving across all platforms with simple-to-use themes as well as free updates and plugins that are only a few clicks away via the dashboard  Most of us WP users and web designers purchase a theme with majority of the bells & whistles we think we’ll need.  But sometimes the theme falls short, you need your website to have certain functionality that you could not have foreseen needing or you need to add functionality at the behest of your client.  So this is where plugins plug in-filling in the gap between wishing and less limitations.

In the last year, I’ve begun having more fun in the dashboard and realize that I’ve been missing out on all the cool plugins that make building/editing a site more efficient as well as functional.  Some are tried and true while others are indeed new.  So here’s my list of my favorite WordPress plugins to date.

All-in-One SEO Pack –  All in One SEO Pack Pro v2.1 improves on the most popular WordPress SEO plugin.  Not only can you set site-wide defaults in WordPress as well as customize the search engine settings for each individual WordPress post, page and custom post type but now you can manage exactly how search engines crawl each page or post.  All in One SEO Pack Pro even gives you complete control over your social meta or OpenGraph meta so you can control what appears on your favorite social media sites.

Custom Link Widget –  A Simple, straight-forward plugin that lets you insert links as the widget. Just insert your link, name it and it will convert it to a hyperlink automatically.

Image Widget – A simple image widget that uses the native WordPress media manager to add image widgets to your site.  It automatically resizes and aligns your image, allows you to link the image and even allows you to override your theme template!

Post Types Order – You can custom order the posts without making any php file changes or publish date resetting.  Simply install plugin, drag & drop.

Widget Logic – This widget gives you extra control field called “Widget logic” that lets you control the pages that the widget will appear on.

Ultimate TinyMCE – A chock full kitchen sink of editorial/functional options.

WP Touch – This plugin reformats your website to a mobile site for easy navigation & shortcuts on Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android, Blackberry Storm and Torch, Palm Pre and other touchscreen smartphones.

Acurax Social Media Widget – This so ridiculously simple plugin lets you define the icon style & add multiple social media linked icons to your Twitter,Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube,RSS Feed,Linkedin, and Google+.

TweetMeme Retweet Buttonadds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

So there you have it – just a few ways to make WordPress work better for you.

I’d love to hear your faves – which are some of your favorite plugins?