I just recently finished my first freelance blog design project for a fantastic client in Silicon Valley, Rajesh Setty. I became friends with Rajesh through the blogosphere about a year ago; he is President of Suggestica.com and Foresight Plus LLC, Chairman of iPolipo, Co-Founder of CIGNEX, published author, and much more. In other words, he is a very productive individual!

Raj writes a blog called Life Beyond Code, a supplementary resource to his book Beyond Code, about career development for technology professionals. For this project, we teamed with John Keegan, CEO of BlogHarbor, to port Rajesh’s blog from the Blogware CMS to WordPress 2.3. So basically, I was responsible for adapting Raj’s pre-existing layout, imagery, and styling to a new “theme” for a different content management system. For the framework, I used Dennis’ Ahem theme. On top of that, I built a new Archive structure, and implemented several plugin packages to optimize Raj’s search engine placement and reader retention (things like redirecting autodiscover tags to his FeedBurner RSS feed, improving META tag descriptions, adding Most Popular Posts functionality, and creating a sitemap to increase Google pagerank).

The end product looks pretty much the same as the original blog, but it now operates in WP and hopefully should perform a little better in searches and offer readers some neat new features!

WordPress is an open-source project, and my content management system of choice. Hopefully, this is just the first of many projects to come. I am currently taking on a few new clients to do blog setup & design for professionals and small businesses as a side business. For more information, see my business site.