Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, a quick update on that slow-moving internal project of overhauling the Blue Hills Digital website. I'm pleased to report that ... 🎺 🥁 ... the new homepage is live now!

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🪄 2 themes on the same site, at the same time ...

Applying a whole new theme to a website typically involves cloning the site, doing all the re-theming work out of public view, and then launching a brand-new-looking site all at once.

When I started this incremental redesign of the Blue Hills Digital site, I said I wanted to work on it incrementally.

I knew the project would be slow because it takes the backseat to client project work, yet I didn't want to miss out on the benefits of allowing sections of the site to adopt the new branding and features as soon as they were ready.

To do this, I needed a way to be able to have pages (and other content types) exist in one of the following two states (and if you’re familiar with how WordPress works, you’ll understand why this is tricky!) …

1. Show the current (soon-to-be-old) header and navigation, existing font and colors set in the theme settings, etc.
2. Show the new header and navigation, and use a set of updated font and color settings that will be updated in the theme settings once the refresh is complete.

For this magic to work, I created a separate author that I can assign to refreshed pages, one by one, as I update them.

Then for pages with this author assigned, I have:

• Overridden the header with the new one
• Loaded an additional CSS stylesheet with the style overrides from the redesign
• Displayed an announcement bar giving some context about why these pages look different

Over the past couple of weeks, I've slowly been rolling out pages with the new design, and fine-tuning the components as I go.

Yesterday, I pushed the updated homepage live, along with all the service pages. You can go check it out here.

I’ll leave the announcement bar live for a while longer since there are a few product pages (like the Nonprofit Website Audit Workbook) that are still using the old design. That’s because …

The next step is to build out the planned “Resources” content type. This will be a place to house resources I develop, both free downloads and paid products.

Once this is ready, those last few pages that currently house resource or product-type information can get converted over.

Thanks for following along 🙂

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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