The ChicagoBaseballMuseum.org is a virtual museum dedicated to Chicago’s baseball history. O3 Internet has published content to the Chicago Baseball Museum’s website for nearly a decade. Over the years, we’ve redesigned the site and created several microsites that feature Chicago Baseball History.
O3 recently completed a WordPress website conversion to a fully mobile responsive custom WordPress website, with easy-to-enter blog posts, contact forms, and improved social media functionality. The layout was updated with a cleaner, brighter design, and clear content hierarchy.
Writers can input blog post content
The new website allows the Museum’s writers to input their own blog post content. Blog postings can be easily viewed in all screen sizes and can be shared directly via social media. Previously, posting new articles required knowledge of HTML and PHP coding, with excerpts on the homepage and links to PDFs. This meant all articles had to be made as PDFs first – not the most accessible method when most of your readers view your website on mobile devices. And, when publishing content on social media, links went to the homepage, not the article itself. The new website is more efficient, more accessible, and more social-media friendly.
Mobile friendly menu
The menu has gone though a major upgrade: now built in WordPress, it is easier to make quick changes to the menu using the menu builder. The menu is also mobile responsive, converting into a fly-out menu for mobile devices.
User-friendly contact forms
The contact form is built using Gravity Forms (our favorite WordPress form plugin). This allows the owner to keep in touch with site visitors with automatic notifications. It also provides for future expansion by easily creating additional forms, and in the future, integrating with platforms such as PayPal.
Sidebars now include Facebook and Twitter embeds, calls to action and rotating images of historic likenesses of Chicago baseball player baseball cards.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – part of every project
Search Engine Optimization was improved using Yoast SEO. Yoast is an SEO plugin that makes it easy to target keywords and meta information within each page or post. As the new website was developed, O3 fully optimized all pages for important search keywords. The SEO plugin allows editors to optimize posts and pages, with helpful hints on every post. The museum’s previous search engine rankings were preserved by redirecting old pages to current pages when the site was launched.
Altogether, the new website provides much in the way of mobile responsive design, usability, search engine findability plus the ease of fast and efficient content updates to keep the site always fresh with new content.