• Design and develop a responsive WordPress theme
• Establish style guidelines from the graphic designer's site banner design
• Create mockups and prototypes and present them to stakeholders
• Write modular SASS, create custom templates, develop features and a functionality plugin for customizing the Archives page and author pages
• Implement caching and asset optimization and work with server admin to optimize performance and TTFB (Time to First Byte) on Azure Cloud

Lessons Learned: When contemplating a redesign, businesses often look first to the theme store. For an existing brand, one-size-fits-all solutions are difficult to tame and often lack support for older browsers. I proposed building a custom theme, and while offered a good learning experience, I soon realized I was reinventing the wheel for a rather conventional blog, and it would make more sense to build a child theme for this project. WordPress's out-of-the-box themes are responsive by default, have great browser support, and no feature bloat. I built a child theme atop of twentysixteen, making use of a lot of the base templates so I could spend more time crafting a fresh, modern look that would attract renewed interest in the content.