About Our New Website
If you visited our site before, you’ve undoubtedly noticed some changes.
We’re excited about the new website and the new possibilities.
And we had a lot of fun building this in-house. Here are some highlights of the changes.
New content
The biggest change is that I have joined Amy as a partner in the business. This necessitated the addition of a Team section with bio for both Amy and myself. We’ve also made it easier to connect with both of us on social media.
The biggest content addition is the AAC Blog. We’ll be writing regularly about integrated communications, marketing, social media, the Nashville community and much more. If you like what you see, make sure to sign up for weekly email updates. We made them weekly as opposed to when we post. If you can’t wait, there is always the blog feed.
We have plans for some special content sections soon. In particular, we’ll be expanding on the social media programming idea that Amy wrote about as well as my passion for Google Analytics.
Cleaner design
The new design is much lighter than the previous design.
You’ll notice we’re using some larger fonts, mainly to support the responsive design.
Responsive design
This was the biggest challenge and the most exciting.
We chose the Bootstrap framework for a couple of reasons:
- It’s intuitive to use. The documentation is amazing as are the resources available online.
- The built-in CSS and components, especially the easy grid system. The column classes are easy to understand and implement.
- The viewport sizes fits our goals of having responsiveness for tablets and mobile phones.
We barely scratched the surface of everything that Bootstrap can do. Excited to implement more over time.
Geeky Stuff
I definitely got to geek out a little with the new website.
We’re now using Google Tag Manager to manage analytics and events monitoring, such as form submissions. It’s far easier than adding Javascript code for each event. I look forward to expanding how we use GTM to monitor links and other events.
Here are few of the plugins that we used for the development:
- ACF Repeater. This is a must if you are using custom fields. We’re using it to populate the expertise fields in the sidebar on the Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media and Events service pages.
- Editorial Calendar. Another must to manage your schedule for blog posts.
- Yoast SEO Plugin. Fantastic for SEO analysis.
What’s next?
Blog posts, blog posts and more blog posts.
We want to convert the website to the Genesis framework at some point. It was a little too much to do that and learn Bootstrap at the same time.
As I mentioned, we’ve got some great ideas for resource pages that bring together blog posts, guides and other original content.
Your turn
Let use know what you think in the comments.
Filed Under: News
