Purpose: Nine Lives Media is an IT-based startup that helps their clients to profit from emerging media. They sought to partner with a blog development company who could redesign and enhance their two blog-properties: MSPMentor and The VAR Guy.
The biggest challenge to the project was completing both sites, from design concept to launch, in five weeks. This meant that ContentRobot would be:
- Creating 2 design concepts in Photoshop
- Developing two WordPress themes, integrating ad serving needs
- Assisting with a new host environment
- Installing and configuring WordPress and any required plugins twice
- Performing any custom programming, plugin hacks, including a custom registration form and secure area
- Converting content from two existing WordPress hosted sites
- Testing
- And, finally, launching
The Nine Lives team helped greatly to keep both projects moving along because they remained very involved in the process. They quickly were able to sign up for a new host, understood their design needs (going as far as submitting wire frames, which depicted the various pieces of required functionality), and providing us full access to the content and other assets. With a flurry of emails and phone calls, the decisions came quickly, often, and easy – allowing us to work efficiently and cohesively.
Features: ContentRobot designed The VAR Guy with a more casual motif. The theme was created so that Nine Lives could add or remove advertising banners and other plugins and/or widgets, while retaining a balanced look.
The site features a Resource Center, which is available to registered users only, and contains exclusive access to industry whitepapers, downloads, videos, and more.
Along with this password-protected area, ContentRobot customized the WordPress registration forms for easy entry to this section.
On the back-end, ContentRobot provided our technical wizardry and customization skills to implement the following plugins:
- Menu: Sticky Menu (single panel administration of site menus)
- Category Enhancements: Category Description Editor (uses the Write > Panel to edit category descriptions and display them as sticky posts), Category Cloud Widget
- Sidebar Features: Get Recent Comments, Popularity Contest and Popularity Contest Widget, and WP Authors (shows authors on the fly)
- Ad Management: AdServe (simple way to add banners of all sizes into various zones within the theme)
- Custom Registration Form: Cimy User Extra Fields, Get Custom Field Values, and RC Custom Field GUI
- SEO: All in One SEO Pack and Google (XML) Sitemaps
- More plugins: Better Article Excerpts (for automatic excerpting of posts after the first paragraph), Viper’s Video Quicktags (to easily post videos from throughout the web), Google Analytics (for metrics) and Contact Form 7 (for contact forms), and FeedBurner FeedSmith
Why It’s Successful: Nine Lives has been able to leverage their enviable industry contacts and has already been able to drive an impressive amount traffic to the blogs. Their technical community has responded well to the new look and content, and the comments have been nothing short of positive.