I’ve been planning on a rebrand for a while.  New logo, new marketing material, new email templates…  all important, and a new website was pretty close to the top of the list too, and somehow I got it up in less than 5 days, while still keeping up with everything else.

Day 1 – 11:30p – Template purchased

Day 5 – 6:30p – New Website is live

How?  Here were the steps I took.

1. Lots, and lots, and lots of research.  Looking at sites I liked, and why?  looking at sites I didn’t like, and why?  What features did I see that I wanted to incorporate and what did I not care at all about?
2. Planning.  I created a mind-map that laid out the general site design.
3. Pre-Production.  I pulled together as many of the graphic elements I needed – logos, etc
4. Testing.  Using the above, I took as many templates for a test drive as I could.  I knew I wanted WordPress but that was about it – looking at as many templates as possible I narrowed it down to the top 5 and really dug in – just 1 came out on top.

From there it was a matter of installing the template and personalizing it – and voila!  The new site is up.  I won’t say ‘done’ (is a website ever done?) but it is at a place where I’m ready to start sharing it with people and getting feedback on little tweaks.

New site – live!