I’m working on my eco-portfolio of websites (see EnviroGadget), and hence my latest new project is Daily Eco Tips. I purchased this website from someone who hadn’t updated the site in 3 months, so I thought it was a good candidate for being sold. I really liked the domain name and the site itself, so it was more a site of passion than of profit. I should be able to make some cash through the site too, but that’s a bonus rather than motivation.

The Original Daily Eco Tips

The original site was based on Joomla, which is my least favourite content management system. It’s slow, heavy-duty and error-prone. And the template files!? My goodness they are complex. It took several seconds to load on my PC even when installed locally.

The first thing I wanted to do was move the system to Wordpress. It’s a beast I know, love and understand. It took a little while to port the theme to something I like, particularly with the differences between IE and Firefox. However, the result is very pleasant on the eye and very easily to manage and extend.

My priorities with the change were to have advertising space should I want it and to make the RSS feeds far more prominent in the top fold of the site. It’s only a few of the original graphics that I ported in the end, as the RSS icons, menu, search box, footer and colour scheme are all my own choosing. I’m not bothering with advertising until the traffic reaches a reasonable level. Even then, I might not bother at all.

At the end of several hours work, I’m really pleased with the result. Definitely my best work so far.