Weirdass

The Challenge

Weirdass.co.uk covers geek-culture, games, films, weird animals, facts, science, tech and more. It started in 2009/2010 and was a joint venture of a few local bloggers that had an interest in all things weird.

When looking to improve their website they came to us for help and advice. The site had originally been based on the open-source CMS Joomla, but many of the bloggers and editors struggled with the interface at the time, so we suggested WordPress as it is well-known for its ease of use for content creators, and showed them the back-end interface to those that weren’t as familiar.

Everyone agreed that WordPress was a suitable option and so we set about migrating the site with hundreds of posts to WordPress from Joomla. This went reasonably well, and there were only a few smaller issues to address with the migration.

We started to redesign the website based on a simple, magazine style layout. Once we got the basics in place we concentrated on various sections of the website that we could improve.

We are still in the process of rolling out the new design as there are many tweaks to make. For example, the weirdass animals section contains some very weird creatures from around the world, so we made sure there was a nice big sliding image header at the top that slides through the different animals they have featured.

We will gradually roll out more styling for each section and create post templates for “featured posts” that are larger and more in-depth than the standard, smaller posts.

We are also carrying out some A/B testing to see what kind of page layouts visitors preferred and what keeps people reading the pages for longer. We will continue to make changes over the next few months based on the results.

Interested In Working With Us?