January 29, 2017

It’s been 2173 days, 52,175 hours and 3,130,550 minutes since I launched my first version of SebastianAgosta.com on January 25th, 2011 (No, I didn’t actually count those minutes, I used this handy site). That means I’m about 1,160,640 minutes late on launching the second version and even though it took me well over 60 hours to complete, I’m happy to say what I’ve come up with is something I’m truly happy to share.

Back when I first launched SebastianAgosta.com, I barely had a year of real world online marketing work experience under my belt. I put together a site that I used as a platform to share some of my latest work, my opinions on various tech gadgets and the types of services I offered businesses in the Windsor-Essex area. The site served me well for the past 4 years and really helped me gain the work experience needed to get me to the place where I am in my career today.

As I designed, programmed and wrote the content for this version of the site, I tried to keep a few words in mind when it came to what I wanted to produce as a final product. I thought it’d be fun to review those 4 words and share them with you to give you an idea of where my head-space was during the process.

Personality
In this day in age, it’s hard for anyone in any industry to be noticed. It almost feels like unless you have a completely unique service or product the likelihood of you standing out from the crowd is slim to none. I started thinking about what sets me apart from all the other online marketers out there and I kept coming back to one thing – my personality. I decided that the best way to showcase how I’m different is by letting my personality shine through my website. You’ll notice that most of the content on my site is well written, but not in an uber-professional tone like you might expect. You’ll also notice in several sections of the site I talk about my own personal interests such as: books I’ve read, sports teams I cheer, TV shows I watch and quotes that all help people get to know me a little better.

Engaging
It was important to me that my site be engaging. Not engaging in the sense of engaging users to click on certain links or images but engaging in the sense of sharing and connection. While I had (terrible) social media icons on the first version of my site, there was no call to action around them to get people to engage. Now, I’m using larger, more colourful social media icons and placing them in areas on the site that receive plenty of views. You’ll also notice at the bottom of this and every blog post social Share icons which easily allow people to share my blog post across a number of social media networks. This type of connectivity is important to me because I think the connections and relationships we forge are what truly define our character.

Clean
The hardest part of the entire process of redesigning and redeveloping this website was the design portion. I went back and forth with several iterations of this design and tinkered with fonts, colors and images far too many times to count. One thing that stayed consistent throughout though was the idea of a clean website. I wanted this site to be easy to navigate, easy for the eye to travel through and most importantly incorporate plenty of whitespace. I made use of different styles of text formatting where I could to keep imagery to a minimum and improved the blog significantly by removing all ads, comments and tags which just seemed to make things cluttered on my old site.

Automation
The first version of my site featured a blog that appeared to be built into the site (thanks to my fancy design work) but it wasn’t (fooled ya). Updating a page of my website was done in a separate area from where I updated my blog and it always bothered me. The first thing I decided when coming up with this version of my site was doing the entire thing in WordPress. WordPress allows me to not only update my pages and my blog in the same area, but also allows me to easily “pull” those blog posts to different areas of the site. The other piece of automation is the newsletter signup areas you see throughout the site. Anytime someone subscribes to my newsletter it automatically updates my email software with that email so the second you signup, you’re subscribed.

I’d like to thank all my clients, friends and family who helped me throughout the process of putting this site together. Especially those who took time out of their busy schedule to review and critique the site before it was even launched. “You da real MVP.”