Patricia Luzi of ISIS Training was introduced to me through a mutual friend and from the first conversation I had with her, I knew I wanted to work with her. Patricia possesses a wonderfully unique blend of super-solid business experience, a wide breadth of knowledge, wisdom, and an unconventional approach to life. She needed a new website: primarily, she needed one the actually showed up in search engines. But she also needed one that could communicate her extensive corporate experience alongside her unconventionality.

To begin, I went through a full creative discovery phase with Patricia where we examined her business, her personality, her goals, her key messages, and more to determine what content her site needed and how it should be presented. I then hooked Patricia up with Ward Swan, one of the best writers I know (and a close personal friend). They hammered out the site copy together. Once that was locked, we went through a design phase, locked the design, and built her site.

I built Patricia’s site using the WordPress platform. I recommended this platform for a number of reasons:

• SEO was important for Patricia, so whatever platform we used, we had to use something which was search engine friendly to begin with and could easily be tuned for any future SEO campaigns she might undertake.
• She was interested in blogging. I told Patricia that consistent blogging was one of the most effective ways to search engine ranking fast. Plus, her knowledge and training-oriented nature made her a natural for blogging. If you’re going to blog, you can’t beat WordPress.
• She needed to be able to manage the site herself. It didn’t make sense for Patricia to have to talk to a web developer every time she made a change to the site – she needed a platform that she could handle herself.
• The site had to be expandable. Patricia’s business is growing and changing all the time. She will be rolling out new products in the future and expanding her services. It was crucial that she had a platform that could change along with her.
• The site had to be economical. A completely custom content management system would have been prohibitively expensive, not to mention totally unnecessary. It made good economical sense to use a platform that is extremely solid, has a huge support structure, and is entirely free.

For all these reasons and more, WordPress made the most sense to use as a CMS for her site. The technical integration was a snap and all I did was develop a nice custom theme for her.

The design presented an interesting challenge: the site needed to feel professional and corporation-friendly, but it also needed to reflect Patricia’s more free-spirited nature. It also needed to be bold and to stand out from all the other corporate training websites out there. The design we settled on uses bold, sans-serif typography set in clean, static boxes to ground the site and provide a solid, corporate foundation. Then we used some bright, organic colors along with a unique, textured background to reflect Patricia’s more unconventional personality. We also did some fun CSS where the main site content scrolls while the navigation stays static. The end result is a site that is corporate yet unconventional, professional yet creative.

Patricia was very happy with the site and she got a lot of compliments. It’s also nice that she’s showing up as #1 on Google’s listings for “isis training” (despite numerous competitors) and now shows up on a number of her content keywords, all without doing any concentrated SEO.