After deciding that I needed to do more with my ideas around BoxBoxBox, I figured it was time for a new website. Not simply for the sake of it – more because the whole idea had somehow become simply a shop and was running on Shopify. With this whole ‘reboot’ I wanted to make the brand what I wanted it to be – about motorsport and a home for sharing my thoughts, projects and whatever.
Shopify is brilliant for running a shop and all else that’s involved in the shop sense of things, but outside that it’s not what I needed. To reboot the idea of what BoxBoxBox is I was fighting against Shopify, it wasn’t the right tool.
So here I am, on a WordPress based website project. It’s a throwback for me, I used to build out WP based websites regularly, for clients as well as my own projects. I learned a lot while running the Badger GP blog back in the early 2000s and still run the Fantasy Grand Prix game on WP too.
I enjoy the flexibility of WordPress – you really can build out sites easily and have scope to do a lot more. For the BoxBoxBox website, it’s a clean WordPress setup, using the minimal number of plugins and what not that I can get away with:
FluentForms & FluentCRM – very simply, these are my tools for managing email newsletters because I became tired of the endlessly rising cost of MailChimp and similar services. MailChimp used to be ace, but it’s not the product it used to be. It may be super clever and have a billion features, but for sending an email every few weeks it’s silly. Fluent’s setup works a treat and is fully integrated into WordPress. Tidy.
SmartCrawl, Hummingbird, Defender & Smush – the classic must have plugins from WPMUDev – the same people who host the website with their excellent web hosting offering. This suite of tools helps me manage the SEO, performance and security without having to work too hard.
And that’s it. The theme I’m using is Salient – I have concerns with it, but with a lack of time to build my own theme, it really is still one of the best and most well-supported WordPress themes out there. Some of basic templates are genuinely well designed or interesting and it sure does speed up the development of a site and allow me to focus on content. The other side of my brain wants to build out my own theme, using the newer WordPress patterns and I can see that happening at some point.
