I’ve been helping my friend Missy give her business creating murals, paintings, and other awesome design work a home on the web. Check it out, it’s called Rooted Design at rooteddesignspace.com. She reached out to me last year because she needed a website, and that’s kind of up my alley, so together we’ve been steadily creating a place for her to showcase her work. We recently refreshed things on the site and it’s looking great!

Full disclosure: I work with WordPress.com as a Happiness Engineer (come work with us) so you can expect this post to be unashamedly biased.😃

Some of the goals of the site refresh are:

• Reorienting the header horizontally so it takes up less real estate
• Adjusting the styles (for buttons and links) for various elements site-wide
• Adding additional SEO improvements to help her market her services

In order to make the design changes easier and set us up for further changes in the future, I helped Missy move the site from a traditional WordPress theme (Seedlet) to a newer WordPress theme (Meraki) that allows for full control over all aspects of the site’s design (known as FSE or full site editing).

We also took advantage of the Copy site feature to make a version of the site that we could experiment with without impacting the live site, and Missy could use the Site Preview link feature to share the experimental site with others without making it public or requiring anyone to create an account to provide feedback.

Here is a comparison between the old and the new. Nothing drastic but the new site offers a lot more flexibility for future changes.

Before

Now

Websites, like many things, are never really “done”. They are perpetually a work in progress. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still celebrate the little wins along the way. This was a good one.