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✨ New homepage is live!
Published about 2 months ago • 2 min read
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!
This is part of a series in which I'm writing about the process of refreshing the Blue Hills Digital website. I introduced the project in my Digital Landscape email on May 20. If you missed it, read that email here! And for updates, keep an eye on the project changelog here.
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!) …
Show the current (soon-to-be-old) header and navigation, existing font and colors set in the theme settings, etc.
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.
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.
If you have a question about how to optimize your website or get more out of your digital marketing we’ll do our best to help out. Hit reply and send us a message and we’ll get in touch.
🔗 Affiliate Disclosure
Some links to products or services in The Digital Landscape emails and on the Blue Hills Digital website are affiliate links. This means we may receive compensation in return for new customers we refer. We only recommend products and services we use and love, and this helps us fund the creation of educational content for subscribers like you!
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