- Date: 2019-2020.
- Developed by Raúl Bartolomé Castro.
- Customers: general public with interest in engineering, management and finance.
- Raúl’s contribution: as developer, designer and administrator.
- Product category: website.
The website https://raulbartolome.com/ is the professional online showcase of Raúl Bartolomé. It is intended to show an excerpt of his professional curriculum vitae, promote the portfolio of projects, download of academics’ documents, sharing of articles in a blog fashion and point of contact.
The site is created with WordPress and many other pieces of software. The style and structure was defined by a marketing manager, as a result the website presents a clean, modern and simple structure. The website has a single column white body, three columns dark footer and a sticky menu.
The website is hosted in AWS that provides an affordable and professional hosting (you might find interesting the article “Moving from HostGator to Amazon Web Services”). Lightsail is the tool of choice from AWS to implement the hosting, it is simple, effective and powerful. The instance is based in a Linux/Unix platform and WordPress stack from Bitnami. The setup is automatic and free of hassle, the only command line operations were the implementation of Let’s Encrypt Certificate for HTTPS communication.
The website pivots around the latest distribution of WordPress but are necessary a long list of plugins to achieve the desired goals. The list of themes and plugins are the following:
- OceanWP theme, a multi-purpose theme with support for many plugins and with many extensions. Including Ocean Portfolio, Ocean Posts Slider, Ocean Cookie Notice, Ocean Sticky Header and others.
- Availability of two languages, English and Spanish, thanks to the plugin WMPL, the best option for multilingual sites.
- Automatic updates of WordPress, themes and plugins using Easy Updates Manager. This is a big relive of the administrative work.
- Connection to Google Analytics using ExactMetrics, a key pillar to track the statistics of the site.
- Advertising in some areas of the website using Google AdSense and the plugin Ad Inserter. This is one of the mechanisms to monetize the website.
- Implementation of eCommerce web shop using WooCommerce with associated plugins for administration, multilingual and Paypal checkout gateway.
- Contact form using WPFroms Lite. The basic free functionality is sufficient for the purpose of this website.
- Search engine optimization thanks to Yoast SEO, a solid solution out of the box.
- eMail communication using WP Mail SMTP, a simple but effective way to implement email communication from the website to any destination.
- Fast website navigation with cache acceleration from WP Fastest Cache, the best solution in the market configured with just few clicks.
- Some other administrative plugins such as WP File Manager, WP Broken Link Status Checker, Regenerate Thumbnails, Smart Slider 3, Post Type Switcher, PDFjs Viewer, Media Library Assistant, Health Check & Troubleshooting, Duplicate Post, Classic Editor and Akismet Anti-Spam.
The user experience is an important part of this project. The website is intended to serve smartphones, tables and desktop. It is with mobile devices when the simple and clean structure of the website show its full potential. The menu, content and pictures adapt dynamically to any screen size providing a comfortable experience.
The section projects is implemented with a portfolio functionality from OceanWP. The entry view is a clean 4×3 showcase of projects with pictures, titles and categories. The single project view presents a generous header with a featured picture, title and breadcrumb. It holds the description of the project in a single column, and the footer allows to share the project in social media, suggest other related projects and the chance to write a comment.
The downloads are embodied with WooCommerce, the most popular eCommerce tool in Internet. The general page is also a simple 4×3 showcase with filters that provide two views of displaying and multiple sorting options. The single view of the download presents the front page of the academic work, a short except and the description by a limited in number of pages in PDF format. The website implements the expected functionalities of a web shop: My account (with a dashboard, orders, downloads, address and account details), a dynamic shopping cart, checkout procedure and a PayPal payment gateway.
Last but not least, the article section is implemented with the blog core functionality of WordPress. Following previous menus, the layout is 4×3 showcase with the pictures, categories and except. The single article view follows a structure similar to projects single view case, however the body is structured in two columns. The second column is intended to accommodate advertainments.
In a nutshell, https://raulbartolome.com/ is a professional and modern website that provides to his author the perfect online platform. It fulfils its main goal to promote the professional profile of his owner, showcasing his curriculum, projects, academic works and articles. Additionally, it opens the door for some monetization thanks to download and advertainment.
