Cozykozy.com is a personal website for an iOS engineer named Jason. The site functions primarily as a personal branding tool, but also contains a blogging platform for iOS development, which attracts an average of 20 daily active users.

Jason’s previous website was an out of the box WordPress site with almost no styling. It functioned as a blog primarily, but  the site had no clear message, and did not portray Jason’s skills or contributions to iOS development in a personal way.

 

Make blog posts more visible by highlighting them on the front page
Highlight Jason’s contribution to the development community by highlighting mechanic.js
Give the site personality by adding color, styling, and an about section illustration
Increase ease of navigation by following a one page format for the bulk of the content
Make the site responsive

 

I created a persona of our target user by compiling data from Jason’s existing site and using that information to define the user’s wants and needs. Here are some key attributes I took away from the data analysis:

 Jason’s average user preferred an iphone over any other mobile device by 87%
The average user was 18-34 yrs. old and split evenly between male and female
A strong majority (82%) of users found Jason’s site through organic search or going directly to the url www.cozykozy.com.
Among social networks, over 90% of users were referred via Twitter, and traffic from Twitter stayed on the site an average of 2 minutes. (Linkedin users had an average bounce rate of 100%!)

Once I had determined who my users were and what my goals were, I created wireframes of what the site layout should look like and how content should flow. Keeping my research in mind, I wanted the content to be focused on telling a story about Jason, and the blog to be the first thing people saw, as that is where the majority of users spent their time.

I first hard-coded the site as a prototype to test and make sure there were no major design flaws.

After testing the site, I found one glaring error- There was no way for the user to get to previous blog posts while in a specific blog post. Thanks to testing, I was able to fix the problem before it was an issue. After I fixed the problem, I moved onto converting my site into a custom WordPress theme. Though there were some hiccups along the way, the site looked clean, and I accomplished most of my goals.

Although I was happy with the overall look and feel of the site while prototyping, it just didn’t seem… perfect. After lots of trial and error, I was able to achieve the look I wanted. It took a lot of time. I could have just let it be, but I knew it would bother me, so I revamped and redesigned until it was absolutely perfect.

 

The site is now a finished product, and you can view it live at cozykozy.com.