Subscription-based fitness website
Blog lifestyle website
Developer, Designer
Front-end development, design consultation
2019
Challenge
Robbins Brothers is a jewelry company specializing in engagement and wedding rings. Their old blog site was in need of a refresh to add modern features and styling, as well as to stay current with the company’s evolving brand.
Hypothesis
A refreshed blog site design with more appeal will promote greater use of the site and drive more traffic to the corporate e-commerce site.
Process
1. Understand Pain Points
Discussed the existing blog with the customer, what wasn't working well and how it could be more efficiently maintained.
2. Team with Designer
The customer hired a visual designer to produce the design of the new blog site. I provided feedback on the designs and brought up any technical questions before moving into development.
3. Develop
I developed the blog site with WordPress, PHP, Sass and JavaScript and met the designer’s specifications to the pixel.
4. Stage and Iterate
Once the site was ready to show the customer, it was deployed to a staging environment they could access. This enabled the customer to run QA testing and provide feedback.
5. Sync Content
One of the challenges of this project was the vast amount of content. Content dating back to 2012 was migrated to the new site.
6. Train
After the content had been synced, a temporary freeze was put on new blog post creation. I trained the staff on how to maintain the blog posts within the new WordPress site.
7. Deploy
Once the blog site passed all QA tests and any outstanding requests were completed, it was deployed to the production site.
Deliverables
Integration with corporate site
The customer wanted to integrate the blog with the corporate site so that the transition between the two was seamless. The also wanted to avoid maintaining two separate instances of the corporate navigation. I recommended (and implemented) a navigation bar that adds the corporate navigation through an AJAX request, mirroring the corporate site.
Revamped blog post catalog design
The display of blog posts was enhanced to provide a grid layout, making it easier to browse posts. This modern design enabled us to display the post category, title and an excerpt more clearly.
Improved post categorization
With over 1,000 published blog posts dating back to 2012, the blog design needed to scale with a large amount of content. The category page template clearly organizes each category and enables the customer to easily view and manage categories.
Outcome
The customer was thrilled with the outcome of the blog and its integration with the corporate e-commerce site.
- Through better cohesion with the corporate site and its branding, the customer is able to run more effective cross-channel marketing campaigns.
- Traffic on the site has maintained a steady pace.
- Performance of the blog has improved significantly with better caching and the optimization of images.
Ian McAbee is an expert front-end developer who diligently brought the Robbins Brothers blog to life. We gave him our vision and he executed perfectly. He is knowledgeable and reliable and does an excellent job of blog maintenance as well. We appreciate the partnership.
