In addition to creating modern and effective online content for our clients we have been busy refreshing our own online properties.
The Raising Rystedts blog is a family blog published by our Chief Creative Officer (CCO), Gabrielle. It is also our oldest active online property… and it was in need of a refresh.
The old site had expensive hosting, an inflexible content management system (CMS), poor search engine optimization (SEO) and limited extensibility due to the host’s requirements.
It was time to make a change.
While launching the Rystedt Creative website and designing client projects we began work on re-designing Raising Rystedts.
Like most organizations we wanted the least amount of downtime possible so we developed the new site locally while we left the old site online.
We mimicked the original site’s atmosphere while rethinking the user interface (UI). The old UI felt too constricted on PCs, the multiple blogs were not unified and the UI had no interactive feel. When designing the new website we resolved each of these issues in turn. We modified an existing design to feel more spacious on desktops and read more like a magazine, unified all the old blogs as one blog with multiple category pages and added image and link effects that breathed new life into a simple blog.
The development of the site was accomplished using a customized WordPress powered install with our firm’s preferences. We installed our preferred plugins and edited necessary PHP and CSS files. Finally we began copying content from the old site. In most website relaunches porting old content is one of the most time consuming aspects but it is worth the investment. If done right all of the old content is present but is presented better and optimized more effectively. Creating new content was not our focus in this project – that is happening separately with a large content push.
Finally, launch day! Re-launching a website with the least amount of downtime possible is a multistep process. We left our domain name with the provider we originally purchased it from but pointed it to the servers Rystedt Creative uses for hosting. Necessary databases were set up and the new site content was uploaded. With less than two hours of downtime we had re-launched Raising Rystedts.
We love the new site and we are excited about the content Gabrielle is publishing through it in the near future.
Visit the new Raising Rystedts blog here.
Do you have an old website that may need a refresh?
Expensive hosting? Inflexible CMS? Poor SEO? Limited extensibility?
Contact us for a free consultation.