Stephen Brown, or RemissionMan, is a triathlete, coach, speaker, author, cancer survivor, and all around great guy. When he was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, Steve took to blogging about his experiences and other various aspects of his life. What started out as a way to share his story and connect with other people, as well as a therapeutic exercise, quickly grew into a highly trafficked blog. In addition to his own website, Steve was eventually asked to write for Philadelphia based FOX news’ “Fit To Ride” blog. This only added to the already increasing traffic to his home blog, which was a free Lycos/Tripod site littered with their advertisements (of which he didn’t receive a cut) and hosted on slow, jam-packed servers.
Having known Steve from work (we are part of the same division at our company) and learning about his site, I decided to offer him a new and improved design. We spent some time coming up with a list of what the new site should have and how the general elements should be laid out, and the rest was up to me.
About the design
From the beginning we decided that the new design should be discreet and stand out of the way of the content, which is by far the most important part – especially considering his audience. A calming blue was chosen as the background color and the film strip at the top helped convey the different hats Steve wears in his life. The rest was a simple-to-read 2 column layout with quick access to elements of his blog, which is powered by WordPress. I also decided to build the theme on top of the Thematic framework since it had a good structural foundation for the layout we were shooting for.
Unlike the Tripod hosted site, which seemed to generate HTML in a way as to make it a search engine foe, the new site was developed to make the pages and posts meaningfully described for search engines to find and index properly. A glance at Google Analytics after the site’s first month live shows an impressive number of visitors directed by a range in keywords not previously realized.
For this project, we provided:
- XHTML & CSS
- Graphic design
- WordPress Content Management System
- Thematic framework
- Domain transfer
- Web hosting
