Cindy is a published author, passionate brand evangelist, keynote speaker, and marketing strategist who creates award winning marketing campaigns for publishers, authors, entrepreneurs, and businesses — and Cindy had a problem. As the expert behind the campaigns of more than 200 New York Times bestselling books, her personal brand website didn’t reflect her level of industry expertise or authority, and it didn’t clearly communicate her services.
After working with Cindy to design and develop multiple custom WordPress publishing platforms for her clients, Cindy then retained Bourn Creative to breathe new life into her personal brand and provide her own powerful marketing platform.
We worked with Cindy to create her new WordPress website using a clean, professional design, while embracing elements from her old site to maintain consistency for her audience.
The brand refinement and redesign included:
- The update of her logo design to use cleaner, more elegant typography.
- The evolution of her color palette, using tans instead of grays to create a more warm and friendly feeling, and introducing yellow as a bold accent color for calls to action.
- A new typography stack based on the logotype that is easy to read on devices of any size.
- Brand patterns in circular and striped elements to add visual interest.
- The design of her opt-in ebook cover.
Upon completion of the brand redesign, Bourn Creative created a custom, responsive, HTML5, WordPress website powered by the Genesis Framework with retina support and schema.org integration.
The website features a custom publishing system with unique templates for the Home page, About page, and Clients page that allow the client to:
- Quickly and easily add to and edit complex page layouts.
- Benefit from automatic content formatting and styling on the front-end of the website.
- Leverage drag and drop content reordering, without writing any code.
Many Websites utilize a single large hero image at the top of the home page — and Cindy loved the look it delivers — but the approach was a challenge due to the lack of high quality headshots and personal brand images available at the right shape and size. To provide the hero image effect without one single large image, Bourn Creative designed a device collage of images for the Home page (shown below) that showcases her experience speaking to large audiences.
The Home page also automatically displays the most recent blog post, a custom sidebar, and a footer email marketing opt-in.
The About page was created to house the traditional About page content and to function as a media page. The custom template includes a similar device collage as the Home page template that showcases images of Cindy in action, as seen on media logos, a video and short bio, links to interviews and features, a long professional bio, and key links encouraging visitors to engage with her.
All images, logos, text, and links are editable directly in the custom template interface, giving the client simple text and link fields, image uploaders, and a content editor to use. All content formatting is then applied automatically upon page save.
The Clients page (shown below) acts as Cindy’s portfolio, showcasing her work with clients, photos, and testimonials. The alternating right/left content design is automatic and adjusts every time a new project is added or removed, or when Cindy reorders the projects in the drag and drop interface.
Bourn Creative also:
- Imported, cleaned up, and applied large featured images to Cindy’s past blog posts.
- Converted all existing SEO data to the new codebase.
- Integrated a customized search box that expands from the top of the site when the search icon in the header social menu is clicked on.
- Added custom options to conditionally show email marketing opt-ins in the sidebar, the footer, or on a landing page, on a per page basis.
- Integrated custom Infusionsoft forms
- Provided hosting platform migration support to a WordPress managed host that provides automated daily backups, checkpoints, and an integrated staging environment.
Cindy Ratzlaff continues to work with Bourn Creative on an ongoing basis for consulting, support, and website maintenance.