When the CEO of Sucuri, Inc., a leading internet security company, needed consolidate multiple personal online properties on different platforms into one cohesive personal brand platform built on WordPress, he turned to Bourn Creative.
Tony Perez had multiple websites, one about web security, one about business, and one for personal content. He had the same problems and concerns many business owners have online — he doesn’t have a lot of time, he wanted to blog more, but it felt harder than it should be and his focus was split across several sites.
Bourn Creative worked with Tony to create a website strategy and content plan to merge his websites into one comprehensive personal brand site organized by the key topics of security, business, and life. We kept the PerezBox name, as it not only used his last name, but also held the most brand equity when compared to his other sites and social profiles.
Our goal was to create a single website that:
- Provided an easily recognizable personal brand platform for marketing, speaking, and knowledge sharing
- Made writing and publishing new content easy and enjoyable — because when it’s easy, you’re more likely to actually do it
- Combined the topics of security, business, and life in a way that made sense and made it easy to discover on topic content
- Showcased Tony’s deep expertise, industry authority, media features, and frequent speaking
With a clear strategy in place, Bourn Creative began with the design of Tony’s visual brand, including the PerezBox logo and brand icon design, the color palette and typography stack design, and a comprehensive brand style guide. We then designed the cover images for all social media platforms and an email marketing template header for brand consistency across all marketing platforms.
Upon approval of the brand design, Bourn Creative designed and developed the PerezBox website as a custom, responsive, HTML5, WordPress website powered by the Genesis Framework with retina support and schema.org integration, and a custom designed icon font set, Perezicons.
- The website is divided into three sections, with all posts assigned to one of three categories — security, business, and life. Each category uses a custom sidebar displaying conditional content based on the category.
- WordPress post formats were integrated, creating subtle design changes — like the icon assigned to the post — based on the post format. Post formats were assigned for articles, videos, speaking, links, images, and quotes.
- Two different blockquote designs were created to give the client more flexibility in the visual display of content, with one option using traditional quote styling, and one option using a bold blue colored box with large visual quote icons.
Both the Home page and the About page (shown below) use complex page templates managed by a custom publishing interface. The interface allows the client to add new content and edit content quickly and easily without requiring any code.
The Home page (shown below) tells the story of what new visitors can find on the site. It begins with a large, friendly hero image of Tony Perez. It then introduces visitors to the two core topics they may be interested in, security or business, directing them to the archives for each topic. And finally the page wraps with the three most recent posts in each of the two categories, pulling in the content automatically and updating each time a new post is published in one of those categories.
The About page (shown below) tells Tony’s personal brand story:
- It begins with a warm, casual photo of Tony and a brief bio, quickly introducing him to visitors.
- Visitors are then directed to images of and links to two of Tony’s recent speaking engagements. These are manually curated in the template so the client can choose which speaking engagements to feature.
- The third section of the template displays “as seen on” media logos, providing visual examples of Tony’s media experience. It also provides a two column list showcasing and linking to features, interviews, and quotes. All features listed can be reordered with drag and drop reordering, and the columns are automatically balanced.
- The next section of the page template focuses on Tony’s long professional bio and history, provides additional images and headshots, and displays links to his social media profiles.
- A full browser width opt-in then breaks the page, inviting visitors who may want to hear more from Tony to opt-in and sign up to receive updates by email.
- The final section of the page template is populated automatically and is updated every time a new blog post is published. It displays content from each of his three core categories, with the most recent blog posts displaying the feature image and headline, and the subsequent posts shown in list format. At any time the client can edit the categories, or the number of posts to show, or the order they appear.
While PerezBox is primarily a personal brand platform for Tony Perez, list building and providing visitors a way to stay connected and receive updates from you is always important.
With this in mind, Bourn Creative designed a “sticky widget” attached to the bottom of the website sidebars. Placing the email marketing opt-in at the bottom of the sidebar maintains a professional feel and keeps the focus of the site on the valuable content Tony is providing.
When a visitor is scrolling down a page or post, and the sticky widget reached the top of the page, it sticks to the top of the browser window in place maximizing the visibility of the call to action. This also eliminates the blank white space that is created by shorter sidebars.
In addition to design and development services, Bourn Creative worked with Tony to improve and upgrade all of his blog posts and content, including:
- Importing existing blog posts from existing websites
- Reassigning blog posts into one of three core categories
- Simplifying and combining post tags, creating one core set of tags for each category, and reassigning tags to every post
- Cleaning up all content formatting and styling, removing all styling from alternate platforms, and restyling all content according to SEO best practices
- Adding the WordPress more tag to all posts to create cleaner, easier to browse post archives
- Sourcing, creating, and adding large feature images to every blog post
- Writing new content and writing new blog posts to feature past speaking events
- Copyediting for consistency throughout the site
Upon final site approval, all theme files were provided to Tony and his team at Sucuri, Inc. for review and final website launch.