I love makeovers and this one was long overdue. It’s amazing to see a person or a house transformed.  In the beginning it always seems like a hopeless case. Then you see the big reveal and, wow, it’s magic. If only there was a What Not to Wear for websites.

It’s been two years since our last big website makeover. That’s when I put Stafflink on WordPress. It was a huge step forward because WordPress is an amazing content management system.

But its a whole new world now thanks to Apple’s game-changing devices. Stafflink definitely needed a makeover to get up-to-speed with the mobile revolution.

WordPress to the rescue, again

WordPress and a community of generous WordPress developers all over the globe have kept pace with change, offering a huge selection of frameworks, themes and plugins that make it relatively easy to create a mobile-friendly website. Thanks to the WordPress community, Stafflink is now sporting a brand new look that also happens to be mobile responsive.

The big reveal

No website is every truly finished. I’ll be tweaking our website continuously until I eventually replace it with another whole new design. But this is how Stafflink’s new homepage looks today.

Stafflink.ca gets a new mobile responsive website design

How I built it

If you want to build a responsive website with a job board, it’s not as difficult as you would think. The hardest part was choosing a  WordPress theme.

Here’s the process that I followed in a nutshell.

1. I used BackupBuddy to create a backup of our old site that I could use to set up a test site for the development.
2. I used DesktopServer from ServerPress  and the backup to create a local server on my computer with an exact copy of our old website.
3. I dressed up Stafflink’s content with some of my favourite responsive WordPress themes. The Air  theme from iThemes, the BigBang theme from Themeforest  and Dynamo from Obox Design were three of my favs.

After lots of trial and error I decided to go with a responsive theme called Foxy from Elegant Themes because Stafflink’s owner Tim Collins liked it the best. I recommended this theme because it suited our logo and Elegant themes is very reasonably priced with an excellent support forum. Plus it’s compatible with the plugin that I used for our job board – WP Job Manager.

Questions, Suggestions?

If you have any questions or ideas to improve our new design, please leave a comment.