For a few years now, I have been working with Melinda Samson from Click-Winning Content on various web projects. Mel’s specialties are web copywriting, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, website strategy and content marketing. Along with Serena Star Leonard, she formed Grassroots Internet Strategy, offering straight-forward, jargon-free information about Internet strategy and online marketing.

After working together on so many WordPress.org sites, Mel realised that she wasn’t getting the best results from her current content management system. So recently, she asked me to help move it over to WordPress and revise the design of the site. This was her old site:

Design

Mel wanted to use the popular Genesis framework, so I installed that on her new web host and customised the Magazine child theme to have her header, colours, fonts and styles:

One of my favourite things to design with new sites is the favicon. There’s something about the challenge of fitting a tiny design element into a 16 x 16 pixel square that I just love! Here’s Mel’s new favicon:

Content

Mel then spent many painstaking hours copying and pasting over her old content. Moving a site that already has a lot of content isn’t easy! Another time-consuming job was to make sure that all the links from her old content pointed at the new versions of those posts and pages (which had a slightly different permalink structure). To do that, Mel created a spreadsheet of all the links that had to be redirected, and we used a plugin called Redirection to input all the new and old links. Quite a task!

Since WordPress makes it so easy to customise your site through plugins, Mel got the sidebar looking just right with all the widgets she needed. We used the MailChimp plugin to embed her sign up form, and the ShareThis plugin to give readers an easy way to share her content on the web. If you’d like to know more about plugins, why don’t you download my free eBook about them?

Logistics

We managed to get the site switched over from the old hosting to the new in less than a day, which meant that there was limited interruption for any visitors coming to the site. And since I’m based in the USA, we were able to do the changeover in the middle of the night, Australian time, which minimised the number of potential visitors as well.

Thanks to Mel for having me on her new site! If you need fantastic web copywriting, why don’t you head on over to Click-Winning Content?