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We were talking recently about setting up a business site for writers, and using templates. My own business site needed a major overhaul (for my PR firm, but much of it revolves around PR writing), and I’d been wanting to get it fully moved to Wordpress to be able to integrate a new company blog. As of this morning, that’s officially been done – Jhmattern.com.
I removed my business writing and editing services from this site (they’ll be moved to Jennifer-Mattern.com hopefully before the new year or shortly into it).
The primary content and rates are all on the site, but the copy is still in really bad shape and going to be completely re-worked in the next few days to weeks.
This site was done by altering a pretty basic free Wordpress theme called Sonia (scroll down to find the theme). This is the type of basic edit I’ll probably use as a tutorial in February – most of the changes were simply images (like the logo) and changing colors in the stylesheet (CSS).
The homepage hasn’t been created yet, so I’m directing the home URL to the About page for the moment until I decide what I want permanently on the homepage. I may get that done tonight, so it won’t stay this way for much longer.
Has anyone else been revamping (or creating) their Web presence for the new year?
Related posts:
- Using Wordpress to Host a Non-Blog Site
- More AFW Site Changes
- Problems With the Site Expected
- Make Money on Your Blog or Site With WidgetBucks
- My First Content Site (And How it Helped Me Get Into Freelance Web Writing)
About the Author: Jennifer Mattern
Browse all posts from this author.
A bit ironically, I just finished the basic CSS restructuring for the work section of my site last night. (Still have a few tweaks to hammer out, though one of them I was inspired to fix while writing up this comment, but I’m still not sure where the intended header image file wandered off to.)
I’m glad your sites are going well.
The website looks really, really nice. I love the clean look and the straight lines. My only comment is that the writing on the sidebar is really small, and at a quick glance, I thought I was looking at Google ads (I swear!). It takes less than two seconds to understand that’s not the case, but not sure you want to cause that impression EVER! Maybe making the writing a little bigger would help? Or changing the font? Just an idea.
I’m adding two additional pages to my website over the next month. One about my coaching/editing services (I plan to work on promoting that in 2008) and one about my upcoming book (a fiction anthology). This second page will include links to interviews, reviews, book flyer, etc. I’ll probably should have two websites: one for my freelance work and one for my books, but I can’t handle that right now. Maybe eventually, if I keep selling books and build a large following (fingers crossed!).
I just increased the font size there a little bit. I’m trying to decrease the space between headings and the links in the sidebar, but to no avail b/c of they way they’re tied into the widgets (and the fact that the CSS file is labeled in Spanish or something certainly doesn’t help when trying to find what I need). I’m not too concerned about it… it would be nice to “pretty it up” a bit in that sense though.
The bigger size helps. If you can’t decrease the size between headings and links, you can try doubling the space between the two sections (between the PR Writing link and the Heading after). It’s not what you’re looking for, but I think it would still work to mark a difference (if that’s what you want).
Unfortunately, if I could do one, I could to the other.
The problem is that the sidebar is being done with widgets instead of hard-coding, and it’s not responding to the CSS changes in spacing quite the way it normally would (I don’t get to control as much about the widget headings). If it bugs me enough in the long run (after I fix some more vital things like the copy and homepage), I may just hard-code the sidebar information into the templates and drop the widgets (so much for them supposedly making life easier).
Wow! It looks great.
That is something else on my to-do list. I need a website. It will have to wait until next month though. I am swamped!
Honestly, I hadn’t notice the odd spacing until you mentioned it, so I don’t think it’s that big of a problem. I would wait until the whole site is done to see how you feel about it.
AMAZING — And yes, I’m working on expanding my EBOOK presence within my website on this vacation
I’m actually having an issue now with the blog section (the “next page” links return an error). Ugh… I just can’t seem to win. It’s not quite a typical blog theme, so I’m not surprised I’m running into more issues than usual, but we’ll definitely be using a more basic theme for tutorials in February!
You’re just making me feel better about not wanting to learn HTML and CSS right now
Just realized you were able to fix the links on the sidebar. Looks much, much better now. This may sound picky (again!), but are the links in the second group really “Company Publications”? That sounds to me like you’re talking about e-books or newsletters (things you can either download or subscribe to), when in reality some of them are links to other websites.
They all link to other websites I own. A Web publication is still a “publication.” And remember… the site isn’t just a writer’s site… it’s for a PR firm, so the formality is naturally going to be a bit different than what you might use as a freelance writer.
So the wording “Company Publications” is a common one in the PR world? I didn’t know that. That was my only question left
Other than that, I do really like the clean lines and simple design of the site.
It’s not a PR thing… it’s just more formal. Even in freelancing I tend to refer to websites I work with as “online publications” and not simply “websites.” I keep it more formal because frankly it makes it look more professional than if it were just a personal site. I don’t do my PR work as a freelancer, and just happen to manage sites on the side. I have a more formal company set up for that work, and the sites I produce fall under its umbrella (at least until I get around to incorporating a new company hopefully this year after I finally move, which will take in all of the sites, e-books, blogs, and any self-published print products).
The name “publications” just sounded like something different to me. Maybe I really do need to look into this aspect of writing/publishing more. It feels my vocabulary is outdated when it comes to this aspect of the freelancing world.
I like how it looks, it seems to be effective. I had major issues when doing my html coding — I lost the entire thing at one point, so I suggest if you are doing it on your own to DEFINITELY save an original file (.css) intact before messing around.
Take it from me.
I can’t even seem to be able to change the code in wordpress, so I don’t know how I could handle a whole website! I did work on my own website at one point, but I got so aggravated by the whole thing that I just gave up. I think maybe for those who want to take on the February challenge, it makes more sense to either work on a second website or to start with something small.