A New Look for the Mayor

All of us here at WP Mayor have been wanting to upgrade our website and branding for a number of years. And if you’re in the WordPress community, you might have also heard about our plans for a while.

Well, it’s finally here! We’re very happy to launch a brand new design for WP Mayor. We hope you like it is as much as we do!

There’s a New Mayor In Town

WP Mayor was started way back in 2010 as a personal blog, so the design skills on hand weren’t quite fine-tuned just yet. The original logo was designed to emphasize a trusted and welcoming companion, helping you gain knowledge of WordPress.

While we will always keep the original Mayor near and dear to our hearts for he was the one who stuck with us through thick and thin, it was time for a change.

In fact, the new logo is quite a radical shift from its predecessor. We wanted to go for a clean, minimal design that works well practically everywhere.

Keeping most of the original features – the hat, the monocle, and that incredible moustache – the Mayor now looks you right in the eye, welcoming you to the world of WordPress!

The Website

Of course, we had to address the elephant in the room – the website itself. This was one of the major overhauls that needed special care and attention. The original website had not changed much in 10 years, and it is because of this that the website was starting to get bloated, difficult to navigate across devices, and not as user-friendly as one would expect.

For our new design, we wanted a clean, no-frills website which puts the content front-and-centre. We weren’t looking for an over-the-top look, but rather a simple and effective solution.

After considering the idea of working with designers, agencies, and developers alike to create our new website, we finally decided to do it all in-house. We chose a suite of plugins that we wanted to use and opted for an Elementor-based solution built on the Hello theme.

Having used Elementor since its early days, it’s great to see how far it has come in the past few years. Elementor Pro proved to be one of the best ways to build a beautiful website without dipping your hands too deep into your pockets.

Aside from being a great no-code (or in our case, minimal code) solution and providing us with a way to adjust and create new pages in hours rather than weeks, their support has also been prompt and helpful throughout the past few weeks.

As with any page builder, speed was a concern early on. With that being said, WP Mayor is currently hosted with Servebolt – a high-performance managed hosting provider – and we’ve been very happy with the website’s performance so far.

The Plugins

We have integrated a number of plugins to help with our front-end operations, some of which stood the test of time from our previous website. These include:

• Advanced Custom Fields – to dynamically populate sections on pages
• Gravity Forms – to create contact and submission forms
• MailPoet – to design and send our weekly newsletters
• WooCommerce – to sell our Promotional Services
• WP RSS Aggregator – to import and display Jobs postings

We also decided to split up our blog into a few new categories. Our articles are now split into Topics to help new and regular WordPress users better navigate our online resources.

WP Mayor now also recommends certain products and services throughout our website. We’ve been asked about our preferred tools for a while and we don’t take this step lightly. All these products have been tried and tested for a number of years and are guaranteed to bring you tons of value.

A nice design is great to have, but a website also needs to function smoothly over time, so we took care of making sure we set up our back-end operations in a way that will last the test of time. Here are the main plugins we’re banking on at this time:

• SearchWP – to improve the website’s search functionality
• Thirsty Affiliates – to manage affiliate links
• Blogvault – to back up our website
• Wordfence – for security
• WP Activity Log – to track user and author activity
• Yoast SEO – for all our SEO needs

The Future Is Bright

This website design took us 2 to 3 months from start to finish – that’s initial wireframes in Figma to going live this week.

In reality, though, we’ve been through a number of different design iterations over many years. That’s not to mention the years of work in testing and using different plugins to eventually find what worked best for us.

We’re excited to see how people like yourself will interact with and respond to the new layout. We understand that certain areas may need fine-tuning over time, so if you have any feedback or ideas, please let us know in the comments below or contact us directly – the Mayor would be very grateful.

As for our long-term targets, we’re dedicated to bringing you the best content to help you on your WordPress journey. From short tutorials to full-fledged reviews, WP Mayor will be by your side for many years to come.

Now it’s over to you. Take a look around, bookmark the pages you may want to come back to later, and let us know what you think!