Behind the Scenes at coachradio.tv

I upgraded almost everything at Coach Radio lately and I’ve been fielding questions about the technology, design, developers, and tools I used. Keep in mind that my personality and the needs of my business are big reasons for my choices.

Behind the Scenes

My website is built on WordPress 3.0 (self-hosted). The theme is a customized version of Standard Theme (affiliate link), a simple, easy-to-use WordPress theme. This is the first time I’ve used Standard and I’m also now using it on Need a Topic.

Standard does a great job of cutting down on unnecessary code. Many of the plugins I normally use are built right in, so you don’t have to wait for them to load. A faster website!

Standard is easy to customize, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done behind the scenes. That’s why I put Rob Orr at Orracle Media on the job. Beginning to end was about 30 days and I’m very happy with the results. I’ve since partnered with Rob to launch a simpler design at Need a Topic.

A good designer like Rob will customize a theme to give you the look and feel you want, then hand it over to you to run it. What I like most about the site is the simplicity and openness. It’s easy to overwhelm visitors with text and graphics but Rob made sure that wouldn’t happen.

In terms of design, the body text font is “Arial.” To keep the design simple the heading are also “Arial.” Most of my photos come from Flickr (make sure to search within the creative commons and give credit) or fotolia (affiliate link).

My site is hosted on the Rackspace Cloud through Orracle Media. The advantage here is uptime and speed of delivery. Rackspace is widely know to be one of the best hosting companies, but normally out of reach price wise for most small businesses. You won’t run into that issue if you host with Rob.

In the end I’m very happy with my new site. There’s always a learning curve with new technology, but the combination of a competent designer and a great theme made the process much easier.