Most often, Shelby and I share our different points of view in these weekly blog posts. Sometimes we even rip on each other a little bit … Okay, a lot. But the truth of the matter is we make a pretty darn good team because we do take the time to disagree with each other respectfully, even if you guys don’t always see it that way. In addition, we make a good team because our skill sets compliment each other. It’s left brain, right brain and all that jazz.
Technical vs Creative
While we both have technical and creative skills, I think Shelby would agree I’m the more technically savvy one and she certainly has more creative skills in her pinky finger than I do in my entire body. So when a new website needs to be built, getting the infrastructure set up is my job. Making the site pretty is her job. (This is where the arguing starts. She does so much more than make things look pretty but I like to simplify.)
It takes both skill sets and several others to build a successful business from scratch, but that story is for another day. Today I want to tell you how Shelby and I built this website in a weekend. I took care of the technical tasks and Shelby took care of the creative and content aspects of the project.
First things first …
The impetus to build the site quickly came for two reasons. One, we had landed some speaking gigs and wanted to include a site that was uniquely “She Said, He Said” and not just a page on my personal blog. Two, we were talking to folks who wanted to become our clients and we thought it would make sense to have a site where we could point the decision makers.
After they come, build it …
By January, we had a pretty decent following that was reading the weekly blog posts over on my blog and participating in our weekly Twitter chat. We knew if we set a site up it wouldn’t be like most new sites that only start out with cricket noises in the background. We also had about 7 months of weekly content to move from my personal blog to here, so right off the bat the experience could go on for more than 15 seconds for a new reader.
The really short story of how we did it in one weekend
I selected a dedicated WordPress hosting company (ZippyKid.com). The nice thing about a host like ZippyKid is they spin up the base WordPress install for you and then it’s just a matter of adding a theme and the plugins you need. We went with the Genesis theme framework and the Lexicon child theme. The combination of that theme and a few widgets provide the basic look of our site. Yes, it looks like other sites that use the same theme but it has our logo and, more importantly, our content. That’s what makes us unique. So this all got accomplished between Friday night and Sunday afternoon.
Next, I moved all the blog posts from my blog to here while migrating some of the theme specific search engine optimization fields. It wasn’t a walk in the park, but it happened pretty quickly. What then took Shelby hours and hours and hours was re-editing each post and adjusting the image settings to be compatible with this theme vs. the one on my personal blog.
By Monday morning we were up and running with a brand new site. It really can be that quick (notice I didn’t say easy), and if you ever need a website in a weekend, give us a shout and let’s see if it makes sense for us to work together.
