SRI Website Overhaul

We concluded that our website needs an overhaul last October. Since then we have been strategizing on the marketing aspects of our industry and what areas to refocus on when we relaunch the site. We’ve looked at our competitors websites, we have taken webinars, and overall have a gotten a good sense of where we want to go.  To get started we were recommended to update to Wordpress 4.0 by our site host. It seems to work well with newer flash and had good options for mobile website creation as well. Wordpress and mobile friendly access will also get us back into the good graces of Google. So we downloaded and reviewed the software. I created our shell on my local pc with MAMP while we work on it.  With Wordpress they offer some really great themes to build on. After reviewing quite a few of the options we decided on a theme called “Enigma-PRO”  The theme fits our mold fantastically as it features a slideshow with large images on the main front page and overall the website had a sleek and cutting edge feel to it. So technically speaking we started with a few spreadsheets of data to help us build the areas of the site we wanted to feature. We divided our website “tree” into areas that made sense for our business, and then created similar pages on the site. The software is pretty user friendly so creating a shell of a demo website hasn’t been too hard. We’ve made some good progress in terms of the copy that will be featured on the pages, and we are at a point where we are beginning to select photos that should be featured on the pages and site. It’s also important that we know how to make periodic updates to the content. That is one very important area because our marketing plan will include monthly updates to a feature on the site. Also another reason we wanted to demo the interface software, so that we were comfortable with making changes when we need to.  So we are coming to a point where would like to discuss with you where we go next. I’m not a web designer by any means, I was able to move us along pretty well in the layout, concept, and copy of the pages and site. However the css code is way beyond me. There are changes and modifications that will need to happen in this theme that i don’t think i can or should do. We need help with that type of stuff. I’ve also come to realize that the photo hosting on the site doesn’t make sense the way it is laid out, but i’m sure there ways to insert them where we need to. Thats the type of technical help and completion we need.  My other roles here are going to become very busy in the coming Summer season. We definitely need to move forward on this update as our current website is going to become both obsolete and counterproductive. Once complete we will also need to either make the site mobile friendly or create a mobile version as well. Our President would like us to complete and upload a test site that we can test and review before we actually relaunch the new site. Additionally i’m sure there are very important technical aspects of website design and hosting we are not aware of that should be addressed. We’re going to need some help completing the site and ensuring everything will work correctly.