Dr. Gerry Mullin, also known as The Food MD, is a renowned expert in digestive wellness, nutrition, the gut flora, dietary supplements, probiotics, and more.
He came to Bourn Creative with an existing WordPress website in need of an upgrade and redesign.
With the launch of his newest book The Gut Balance Revolution imminent, Dr. Mullin needed a powerful, personal branding, online marketing platform to showcase his authority expertise, media experience, speaking, and library of published books — and with the new book launch already scheduled by his publisher, there was a non-negotiable deadline to work within.
We first provided Dr. Mullin and his team consulting and website education, then worked together closely on the information architecture and content strategy for the new site, ensuring it not only met the immediate needs of his marketing team, but also had flexibility to grow with his brand in the future.
With a firm content plan in place, wireframes were created to give the client a visual roadmap of the site flow. Once the website wireframes were approved, Bourn Creative designed:
- The visual brand for Dr. Mullin, including the logotype, color palette, and typography.
- The custom, responsive, HTML5, WordPress website powered by the Genesis Framework with retina support and schema.org integration.
- The custom Optin Monster popup design.
- The PDF and 3D email marketing opt-in offer ebook cover.
- Social media profile/page cover image design.
- Ezine header design to coordinate with the website design.
- Hosting platform migration support to a WordPress managed host that provides automated daily backups, checkpoints, and an integrated staging environment.
The WordPress website features a custom publishing system, giving the client the ability to easily edit complex page layouts, benefit from automatic content formatting and styling on the front-end of the website, and leverage drag and drop content reordering — without writing any code. All the client has to do is fill in text fields, select items, and use the built in on-page image uploaders.
Templates included in the custom publishing system are the:
- Home page template
- Books page template
- Blog page template
- Landing page template
The Food MD Home page (shown below) leverages a complex layout with stacked content sections that tell the story of Dr. Mullin’s extensive expertise. Designed to help visitors quickly get to know, like, and trust him, the Home page features content about Dr. Mullin, his scientific approach, and his latest book, direct paths to ways visitors can engage with him, recent blog posts, a customized search option, prestigious testimonials, and an email marketing opt-in.
- The recent blog posts section is populated automatically each time a new blog post is published with the search box allowing visitors to search the blog direct from the Home page.
- All images are added to the page with position-specific image uploaders.
- Several sections including the custom testimonial interface leverage drag and drop reordering capabilities that enable to client to reorganize the testimonials quickly and easily.
- The email marketing opt-in and free ebook offer is added at the bottom of the page, so visitors have a chance to get to know Dr. Mullin before being asked for their email.
Even though the layout is complex, all content on the home page is directly editable by the client without touching a single line of code.
As with the Home page, the Books page (shown below) uses a custom publishing interface.
- A large hero image of Dr. Mullin with several of his published books tops the content.
- The first content section showcases his featured books with an image and description of the book and buttons directing visitors to purchase locations like Amazon, IndieBound, and Barnes & Noble.
- The second content section showcases Dr. Mullin’s additional titles with images that are linkable to a purchase page or sales page.
- Each section is expandable to display as many or as few books as desired by the client, and it offers drag and drop capabilities to reorder the books at any time.
The testimonial section above the email marketing opt-in is unique to the Books page and matches the Home page testimonial design — this allows the client to display different testimonials on each page in a consistent manner.
The primary Blog page (shown below) features a large hero image with a text overlay that are independently editable by the client directly on the blog page. Each post displays a feature image, a short excerpt, and a read more button. To reduce friction and help visitors sample more of Dr. Mullin’s blog posts, the post count was increased on the main blog page and the archives.
The Single Posts leverage a large, full-width featured image (great for social media), a custom author box with Dr. Mullin’s image and bio, a prominent sidebar opt-in, and a custom search feature.
Because list building and email marketing are a key part of Dr. Mullin’s online marketing plan, Bourn Creative developed conditional sidebar and footer widgets that appear based on the context of the content. These widgets provide additional flexibility for the client, and include a sidebar opt-in, a footer opt-in, a popup opt-in that can be conditionally set on a per page or per post basis to maximize conversions. The site also leverages custom sidebar integration, enabling the client to create unique sidebar content for specific pages.