Content Writer sports a fresh new look

As of 17 April 2015, this website has a new look. My first redesign in more than 7 years. I’ve adopted a new set of colours and have finally transferred all my old, static pages onto WordPress. My website and blog are now also tied in together much better.

From HTML to WordPress

I built my first Content Writer website all by myself, using HTML and Dreamweaver, back in 2007.

Only one or two very minor make-overs followed in the next few years, plus the addition of a WordPress blog – a platform I chose in late 2008 when the choice of platform wasn’t as easy as it is now.

I’m glad I went with WordPress then. I love working with this platform. It’s always been my aim to put my entire website onto WordPress at some point as well, but I just never got around to it.

The problem was one born of luxury. I always had too many jobs lined up to have time to redo my own website. New work kept flowing in. There was no real need for a new website. It was still doing its job. So I kept pushing it back.

Until last year, when I gradually started to feel uneasy when looking at my own website. HTML pages were considered old-fashioned.

I had to be honest with myself and admit that even though my site was still bringing in more than enough work, it looked outdated and might well be hurting my reputation.

Because I still didn’t feel like I had time to build a new website, I decided to outsource it.

I didn’t want anything too elaborate, just a clean, basic website that looked modern and professional. And that’s what I got.

Some people may find it boring, but I like that it’s simple yet effective. Nothing that distracts from the words.

New colours to match what I stand for

I picked a new set of colours to better represent my business values and branding.

The blue, grey and sandy brown should project feelings of calm, trust and dependability, practicality and simplicity.

These colours also reflect my own personality: I’m down-to-earth, honest, straight-to-the-point, what-you-see-is-what-you-get, friendly, professional and trustworthy.

Search engine optimisation

Even after 7 years, my old website still performed so well in the search engines that I’ve been afraid to make too many changes to the content and tags.

Obviously Google liked and valued my old website. So I’ve been careful not to change more than about 20% of the content on most of my pages. I felt now was not the time to experiment with new copy. I can slowly make more changes to my content over time.

I did go through all my pages and blog posts and deleted about 20 pages of outdated and irrelevant content. Some services that I used to offer have disappeared and my site now has a narrower focus. It’s now easier to see what my specialties are. I have also strengthened my calls to action on my service pages.

To prevent broken links and preserve all page value that was built up over the years, I have made sure to put in 301 permanent redirects from all my old page URLs to their equivalent pages on the new site. I’ve seen so many businesses over the years that didn’t do this and have had to start from scratch in Google after a website redesign. Such a shame.

The fact that my new site is mobile-friendly should have a positive effect, now that Google will show mobile-friendly websites higher in the rankings for searchers on smartphones.

I can’t wait to see how much of an impact the redesign will have on my search rankings and numbers of visitors, pageviews and enquiries.

Thanks for your interest in reading this.

Oh, and if you landed directly on this blog post, why not take a minute to browse my new site. Best to start on my homepage.