Dave Bond Personal Training Website

July 6th, 2010

Dave Bond already had a web presence when he asked me to redesign his aging website, he had begun to explore social media and had set up Twitter and Facebook accounts to promote his personal training services, but his website was falling behind in getting across his message. Dave had lots of ideas about content for the site and how it would be kept up to date, with new content being added all the time in the form of articles he had written or sourced – it became very apparent that this should be the main focus on the website. We decided to create a blog style site that would introduce Dave as a personal trainer, and then have the main focus of the site on his articles and blog posts – so people could see how active he is within the community and specifically what he does with the various institutions he works with.

Built using WordPress, I created a custom theme and used various page templates for each section of the site – this was so that custom sidebars could display post archives and event listings where appropriate, some pages just pulled in recent posts from a specific category, others have content that is able to be edited by Dave. The following plugins were used to either help displaying or to manage content;

Contact Form 7: Definitely one of the easiest form plugins to work with.
Events: A simple events manager, this lets you create events and allows you to display them on a template page.
Get The Image: This is quickly becoming my favourite WordPress plugin – it displays an image from a post, and is again used on template pages.
Lazyest Gallery: I needed a really simple gallery plugin so Dave could upload images and not have to fuss around with a complex admin area; upload a folder of images to a specific directory (via FTP) and the plugin does the rest to display the images on a page of the site.

Dave is now able to update and manage all the content on his site, as well as publish regularly to his blog; which because the initial home page shows the latest post from each category – will give a fresh look to the site each time a visitor returns to the site.

This was also my first opportunity to work with WordPress 3, and I’ve got to say – I’m very impressed, it seems to be a lot quicker, more stable and easier to use than previous versions – if that was possible.

View the site here; http://dbpersonaltraining.co.uk

Tags: dave bond, Design, personal training, website, wordpress