ContentRobot

So, now that we have our “starter” 3-column theme out there - how will we structure the new site?

We did an audit of our site and realized that it screamed “blogging!” Now, that the concept of blogging is much more mainstream, we’ve decided that a much more simplified, Web 2.0 approach was required for this evolution. This means that we will:

• Create a personality that showcases our expertise, friendliness and approachability.
• Streamline the overall architecture to focus primarily on who we are, what we do, what we’ve done, and how to contact us / hire us.
• Reduce the navigation/menu items down.
• Tweak the color scheme and incorporate more textures into the design.
• Restructure the home page to:
  • Lose the blog elements and gain a much more traditional website look. (Tho the blog itself will display the more bloggy features.)
  • Shorten the copy and focus it much more toward our main offerings.
  • Develop a way to display content quickly and more interestingly.
  • Design feature callout areas to entice you to explore further, but not distract you from reading the main message copy.

• Redesign the blog to be easier to use, comment, share, and learn.

What do you think of this approach? What do you think about before you redesign sites (yours or others)?

What you are currently seeing on our site is ContentRobot’s “starter” WordPress theme. Dubbed “New3Column2pt0,” this simple shell contains very minimal styling and acts mainly to display the most basic 3 column functionality with an added Web 2.0 footer feature area.

We have a collection of various “starter” themes with either one, two or three columns that already have most of the necessary WordPress code and styles already applied. These themes have been heavily optimized and are explicitly designed to provide the utmost flexibility for us to customize them. We use these structured themes as a basis to build many of our client’s custom designs. As you can see these starter themes are pretty stripped down and neutral in design.

For our new site, we started with a structure and content similar to our old design (tag cloud, recent posts, newsletter signup, etc). We knew we wanted to be able to show more content then we could with our old design, so we went with a 3 column design that also incorporates the additional footer feature area.

For now, we have added our Twitter stream, popular posts, and recent comments with the help of various WordPress plugins. The content may ultimately change, but we wanted to show some content options while we develop the theme.
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Soon, the ContentRobot site will look very different; in fact, you’ll think it’s quite broken and that we are insane to not “fix it.”

But there is a method to our madness. Have you ever wondered what it was like to watch the evolution of a site being built? Do you know what it takes to create a theme? How do you all the programming working on a bunch of browsers and platforms? How much effort does it take to convert a website into a new look?

We’ll now is your chance to get these questions answered. ContentRobot thought it would be cool to allow everyone to peek under the covers while we:
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