Just being a developer who makes web sites is not enough—I have to think like a marketing/sales person and consider the long-term success potential of a site. I’m sure a lot of people like Joomla, and I’ve done some work on it for clients, but I’m not the biggest fan. There are just many things I find lacking, and among them are website marketing potential and client ease of use in terms of manipulating content. This is why I suggested converting Hear Florida from a Joomla site to a custom WordPress template when Michelle of 1Stop Marketing Solutions came to me asking for help upgrading the site for better marketing and SEO.

To recreate Hear Florida in WordPress and upgrade it to the client’s needs, I pulled out the base HTML and CSS from what I believe was a modified YooTheme template, along with the content. I then …

• Configured the site to use permalinks.
• Removed all layout-based tables from the content, and generally cleaned up the HTML and CSS for the site. (Tables displaying tabular data were retained.)
• Installed and activated the WPSEO and Google Sitemaps plugins.
• Used the Google Maps API to create location pages which put the logo and address on a point on live maps. Each map point includes that location’s logo and contact information.
• Added a blog with a feed and Feedburner connection. The blog features several custom archive page templates, including a category listing, a single page, and an all-posts listing.
• Added social media connections (Twitter, Facebook, AddThis) to the sidebar and the blog posts.
• Created a newsletter signup form for use with a custom newsletter template.
• Made a dynamic sidebar to load content as it is added by the content admin.
• Created a Q & A section which includes a form to ask questions, a format for reading the answers to previous questions, and social media connections for sharing the content.
• Organized the site and navigation for clarity, ease of use, and elimination of redundancy.

Overall, all parties are pleased with the result and I am confident that this new version of the Hear Florida site will prove to have better longevity and marketability for the company.