A new beginning starts with a single step

Last night, as my cats would not let me sleep, I pushed out the new design here on the website. That means that it took less than 48 hours from starting the design in Sketch until it was designed and built. This gave me some good ideas on how to proceed and of course I also broke the SEO badly by changing the URL structure.

The new design is mostly made up of 2 things: The new header and the hero banner block. The new header was easier than expected, even if the instructions for the navigation sub-menu's was a bit misleading. I went with a less cluttered look and more focus on my content areas, which I have to actually create in order for the design to be complete.

I changed the global template a lot and one of the main things I changed was to break out one of the widget areas so it became full width.  This is something I have looked at for a while, but it was actually a lot easier than expected. By making this change I can have full width content so I can choose the layout I want. By adding custom blocks I can now create puzzle pieces that can do pretty much anything I want.

Next up will be to build the footer, which will be a simple 5 column footer with some CSS styling (using transform). I also need to design the section pages and decide what content you should find there. It's a total of 9 (plus 2) pages for now and then I need to design and build the pages for Guest Blogging, Awesome People instructions and a page about all the features of this site. I also need to update the different databases and clean up the CMS structure so it's easier to work with.

So far I absolutely love to work on this and it felt so good working with PHPStorm again after so long.

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