I’m pleased to announce the official launch of YourSearchAdvisor.com. Not too shabby, eh?
As Tim Ferriss says in The Four Hour Work Week, “Don’t do what you don’t do.” I’m not a designer, so it was about time I hired an expert.
About the Design
3.7 Designs
All of the credit for the design concept, color scheme and layout go to Ross Johnson of 3.7 Designs. He created this custom design based on a few adjectives I used to describe myself, my relationship with my clients, and my professional outlook. If I remember correctly, some of those adjectives were “personal”, “trustworthy”, “organized”, and “holistic”.
From there, he presented me with a creative brief and a mood board to match those sentiments to colors, patterns, ideas and structures that best represent them. Once we agreed on the high-level concepts, he developed a design concept in Photoshop. The site you are seeing now is the result of a few iterations of that concept.
I think we hit the nail on the head, but I’m a little biased.
Behind The Scenes
The new site runs entirely on the WordPress Content Management System (CMS). I chose WordPress for its flexibilty, search engine friendliness and my own familiarity with the product. My previous site only used WordPress to power the blog, the rest of the pages were hand-coded.
Thesis Theme
The design is built on top of the Thesis Framework, a highly flexible and SEO-friendly custom theme. It costs less than $100 (whereas most WordPress themes are distributed freely) but it is worth every penny. I can’t stress enough how robust the Thesis framework is. It allows almost infinite customization without ever actually touching the code (so anybody can do it). I am done with “free” WP themes once and for all. See Ross’ review of Thesis here.
Your Thoughts?
What do you think? Any likes or dislikes? Anything missing or broken? Does everything look okay?
Please leave a comment and let me know. Thanks!
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