I’m pleased to share with you our brand spankin’ new website. It’s been brewing to perfection, and now it’s ready.
We’ve probably guzzled down close to 67,000 cups of coffee (slight exaggeration) and have been slaving over a hot stove to cook up our new online presence you see before your very eyes.
Since we’re in the business of creating websites and doing online marketing, it only made sense to us that we create a better online presence for ourselves. Other than a splash page, there was not much there for people to see. We were putting all of our energy into our client projects and neglected our own website.
But, the train stops here. Today, the cobbler’s children get a pair of Air Jordans.
We’re excited about what we’ve created so far, but this launch is only the start. We’re thrilled to have you along for the journey ahead!
We want this blog to be one of the places you frequently revisit for online/inbound/digital marketing, website design inspiration, and ideas. This blog is where we hope to build an amazing community of people like you — the business owners, marketers, bloggers, designers, and copywriters. Here at LC, we love to learn new skills and this is going to be the focus of our blog.
Today, I’d like to show you what’s under the hood and introduce you to how we approach the challenge of a website that needed to be built from the ground up. I thought this would be a great way to kick off our very first blog post on our new website!
A Look At Our New Website (not just another WordPress site)
The first thing I wanted to share is that our site runs on WordPress. We decided to go with WordPress as a CMS for a few reasons, but the main one being… WordPress is the perfect content system. 
Everything we do revolves around creating content in our industry, so why should our own website be any different?
WordPress is simple, easy to use, scalable, and robust. More people like using it which means there are more developers working on themes, plug-ins, and marketing tools.
Now, I’m not wildly claiming that more people use WordPress. Check out these interesting stats I pulled from an infographic on WordPress’ market share:
Pretty impressive, aye? For many other reasons, WordPress is a lovable CMS in our book and we have carved out a special little warm place in our hearts for it.
The Theme
When it comes to building WordPress sites, we like to start fresh with a theme we purchase. For our site, I purchased a theme called Coffee & Cream from Themeforest.
Great name, right? We thought so too, but it wasn’t the only reason we chose it.
When it came down to it, we chose Coffee & Cream over developing a custom theme from scratch because it has the layout, functionality, and a slew of features that I was looking for. From a design aspect it was flat, super clean, responsive on all devices, compatible across browsers, and had a ton of great shortcodes that help during the development process. After some CSS tweaks, code customization, and branding, the theme was the way I wanted it.
I want to remind you of something important. A theme is not a website.
The truth is, themes are a fantastic way to dramatically shorten the process of creating a website — which clients love — and they allow an agency to get right to creating content, building landing pages, building offers, implementing marketing automation, and the other tasks needed to make a website perform as opposed to trying to fix issues and optimize the site for mobile.
Bottom line. Themes are just awesome. I highly recommend you use them too if it fits your needs.
Creating Content
This is where we spent most (probably more than 80%) of the time on our new site. I worked some long hours to get the content completed and pages built. As you can imagine, I was pretty red-eyed for a while. We wanted all of our content, both words and creative graphics, to really show our vast understanding of how inbound marketing works and our capabilities.
Optimized For Mobile
When someone visits our site on their mobile device or tablet, we wanted them to be just as blown away as our desktop visitors.
The theme we purchased is responsive, but sometimes not everything rendered perfectly. We had to make tweaks to get things to look right. Throughout the entire process, I was constantly checking the site on my iPhone & iPad to make sure the experience was perfect for all of our visitors.
Marketing Tools
We wanted to leverage as many of the best marketing tools and plug-ins as possible. This included testing out many free and paid plug-ins that developers have created for WordPress sites.
This is another great reason to have a WordPress site.
Just as the saying goes “There’s an app for that”, well there is a WordPress plug-in for that too. WordPress is so widely used there is almost a plug-in for anything out there you can think of.
Launching The Site
About a week before going live, the site was pretty much ready to go. It was time to start checking off the pre-launch tasks. Among these tasks included creating 301 redirects (we only had a few of them to take care of) and proofing the site’s content.
It’s important that you know your strengths. Looking over spelling while I’m zipping through writing… definitely is not a strength of mine. If there are any spelling errors left, you can just blame our proofreaders!
Just kidding! Thank you, team, for all your hard work. Our website wouldn’t be as good as it is without all your help. 😉
It was important for me to get this site live as soon as possible so that we can start testing and continue to improve things over time.
Conclusion
Needless to say, after months of hard work, many late nights, and an endless supply of coffee, we’re excited to unveil our new website.
Are you going through a website build or rebuild right now? Have some tips for us? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Feel free to share your experience, we’d love to hear it!
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