I suspect this is one trait of a web developer – you will “get sick” of your own website and will yearn for yet another revamp, lol.

If I recall correctly, this is the fourth time I have revamped WillTan.com … and I think (hope) this new design will be the final one – all thanks to the Pluto theme I am currently using.

You see, my previous web design looked like this :

Well, it looked slick and Pagespeed was superb. I had originally went for this more static frontpage because it will give a consistent feel for every new visitors.

I have always wanted a more blogging style content-based site but … CONTENTS – that’s one of my greatest hurdles that I would say “stalled my online progress”. For me, I would rank content generation as the #1 biggest challenge for anyone who want to make it online!

And this is the reason why I have proceeded to my yet another redesign of this website with a blogging-look theme. I have been scouting the internet for quite a while and only decided to go ahead with revamp until I found this Pluto theme.

Now, what I want to relay is that there is actually nothing wrong with my own design with the GeneratePress theme. In fact, GeneratePress theme is still the #1 WordPress theme in my fave list. In addition, my old design also include a blog (/blog) for my content marketing purpose. The thing is, I’d wanted my frontpage (without the /blog) to be more blogging style, but yet don’t give me “pressure” to blog (writing contents for posts).

With the current Pluto theme, though it’s very blogging-like, it allows posting in various formats ie. standard (text), gallery (image), video, quote (I like this!), audio (podcast) and link (the key reason why I’m using Pluto) … this direct link allows me to create posts without actually writing content as I can just directly hyperlink to my targeted affiliate link. And the video format allows me to just enter a YouTube video URL, again, without writing content … this posting feature indirectly increases the frequency of my postings, giving the perception that my main blogging frontpage more actively updated.

Most importantly, Pluto includes this ad space management which we can configure particular post grids to be ad spaces which we can monetise with affiliate marketing or even selling advertisement.

I first test the theme switch on my staging site … guess what, it crashed (critical errors) the moment I activated the theme – to be precise, I was doing this with a similar Sun theme (by the same author/seller) but somehow Sun theme seems to have depreciated as it was no longer available on Theme Forest.

But at the end, I couldn’t resist the “beauty” of the Pluto theme and go ahead to “take the risk” to buy it to try out.

Originally, I’d intended to activate Pluto on a new WordPress installation and import in the demo so that the site will look exactly like the demo. Then import in the contents, courses (yes, another important element of my website will be the Learning Management System (LMS) part of it) … and the media … ouched … as I’ve “pumped” all the media of my site to Amazon S3 (so as to save space on my cloud hosting).

Story cut short, to eliminate the headache of migrating contents and users, I went ahead to activate Pluto directly on my live site. I’ve intended the entire process would likely to take me 1-2 weeks. But to my surprise, after following the documentation to set up the frontpage, everything just fall into places nicely after hours (six to be precise) of customisation. Cool!

So, stay tuned with me at WillTan.com … with my website redesigned, my next phase is also to redesign my entire approach and strategy to propel WillTan.com to the next level and also to bring value to you all! See ya on my next post … meanwhile, do subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter (see the opt-in at the right sidebar).