Purpose: FutureNow, publishers of GrokDotCom, recently redesigned their corporate website, and looked to ContentRobot to develop a new WordPress theme to match their updated look. Along with its new colors and features, the blog was rebranded as FutureNow's GrokDotCom Marketing Optimization Blog.
Readers can still learn how to increase online conversion rates, accountable multi-channel marketing, and web analytics by reading the blog, subscribing to it via RSS, or receiving daily, weekly, or monthly newsletter content in their email inboxes.
Features: The home page displays five of the latest articles, blog posts, announcements, and events. Because GrokDotCom is a multi-author blog, they feature their writers nicely with every entry.
The right sidebar offers even more content for its visitors with the orange tri-tab area. "Around the Net" offers a blended RSS feed of external sites that GrokDotCom recommends, "Must See Posts" highlight special Grok posts that shouldn't be missed, and "Events" show where you can find the team throughout the year.
While developing the theme, the blog was also treated to the latest version of WordPress (which was 2.6.3 when this case study was written). It also takes advantage of the following plugins:
Why It's Successful: ContentRobot was pleased to assist in FutureNow's rebranding project. The GrokDotCom blog and their newsletters now successfully complement their corporate site.
A more important component to the project, however, was the software upgrade. We moved them off hack-prone WordPress 2.3.3 onto 2.6.3. This also meant that we had to update or even replace some existing plugins, particularly for SEO and metrics (even good-ole Tag Warrior tags were converted to native tags).
We enjoyed the challenge of launching a new design onto top of a new WordPress platform. FutureNow reports that their traffic has steadily increased and that they are enjoying administering the site with all the updated software.