Maya Smart’s vision was to create a bright, upbeat lifestyle blog to impart advice and inspiration to smart, ambitious women — she turned to Bourn Creative to make that vision a reality.
We initially worked with Maya to design her brand look and feel, including the typography, color palette, and logo design, creating a brand icon, alternate versions of her logo, and a complete stationery package. We extended the design to Maya’s social media profiles and print marketing materials.
We then designed and developed a custom, lifestyle-themed, WordPress site and blog, including a custom styles plugin to make content formatting easy and fast, customized Infusionsoft forms, and a specialized pop-up with an email marketing opt-in.
The site was developed as a custom, responsive, HTML5, WordPress website powered by the Genesis Framework with retina support and schema.org integration.
Bourn Creative works with Bourn Creative on ongoing design enhancements, site refinement, and the addition of new features, some of which include:
- Logo design updates as brand evolves.
- Design of new content category icons.
- Design of new opt-in offer PDF and 3D ebook covers.
- Design and implementation of a custom Optin Monster pop up for email marketing.
as an avid reader, Maya began publishing book reviews on her blog. Over time, the success of the reviews prompted her to again reach out to Bourn Creative to design and develop a custom Book Library for her website to separate the reviews from the blog and provide a way for the reviews to be highlighted more prominently.
The new book library and reviews section of her WordPress website uses a custom publishing system that integrates a custom plugin, custom landing page template, a custom book reviews sidebar widget, and a custom post type with unique templates for the individual reviews and the review archive pages.
The individual book reviews feature an image of the book, a list of custom taxonomies such as author, genre, and topic, and an overview and review of the book.
Each book review uses the custom publishing interface, that allows Maya to easily add new book reviews, information about the books, and the book covers to the site without writing any code. The book reviews archive template (shown below) show only the book cover and taxonomies to allow the visitor to quickly browse the books reviewed.
The custom library landing page templates (shown below) give Maya the ability to create manually curated, library style pages that display books in a grid pattern by topic. All books added to the library pages can be reordered using simple drag and drop capabilities.
Once the new library and book reviews feature was complete and pushed live, Bourn Creative provided support to convert all existing book reviews on the blog to the new book reviews custom post type.
Maya continues to work with Bourn Creative on other web properties and to provide consulting, ongoing design and development work, and website support and maintenance.