Behind the scenes: Making the new MOJO Blog

It’s a blog, what’s the big deal? A lot actually. 😉

Back in 2010 when we first launched MOJO it was our blog that led the charge for us to build our community and leap MOJO forward as a brand. As we’ve been looking ahead and defining the direction for MOJO Marketplace, we’ve been busy to say the least.

We have a new rebrand, shiny redesign, completely reengineered platform and an overall refocus on the MOJO brand and product. The blog for me, was just as important to me as we’ll be pushing out all forms of content in 2017 and beyond.

This is a behind scenes look at how we went from talking about a new blog concept to launching it in less than 3 weeks.

Eating our own dog food

One of our core values at MOJO Marketplace is “Eat your own dog food“. You’ll find us in meetings weighing a decision and use our core values to steer us in the right direction. In order for us to show empathy for our users, we need to know what our own dog food tastes like. This has led a lot of our new brand and product thinking. The blog was no different.

Seeing as we’re one of the largest marketplaces for buying & selling WordPress themes we figured why not use a theme from our marketplace and customize it? We could show how powerful our themes are. We could point to a live example of our products in the wild.

We did just that but we took it a step further.

Enter the HighEnd WordPress Theme

Our most popular WordPress theme on the marketplace is Highend with well over 20,000+ sales. It’s easy to see why. The theme can literally be anything you want. The creators of Highend are known as HB-Themes and they’ve been loyal sellers on MOJO for well over 5 years now. We decided to not only use the Highend WordPress theme but team up with the creators of it to really make something special.

On January 30th, we kicked off a call with Branko, the founder of HB Themes to talk about what we wanted to do. After a 30 minute call we covered everything we wanted. The design direction, the focus I wanted on the content and even down to incorporating the graffiti from our new office space. A nice little touch from our CCO, Mike.

A Day Later

Yes, literally a day later, Branko had already started to share his progress. The craziest thing about working with Branko was he actually designs in the code. No wireframes, no Photoshop, no Sketch, just straight to the code. When he emailed us the next day he had his initial concept for the footer based on our new style guide. I felt like he nailed the direction and just like that, we were off on the right path.

Next up, adding a bit of MOJO

After the initial layout was solidified we dove further into the details of the blog. We nailed down the features and the integrations we wanted setup. We also wanted to make sure we had several email opt-in’s throughout the layout and integrate with Constant Contact.

Additionally, we were looking for the homepage to have a masonry layout to change things up a bit. We added some fancy author boxes, offers after each post and other odds and ends. Lastly, we added in our own MOJO by incorporating the graffiti in the new MOJO office space. If you look around the blog, you’ll find little splashes of the graffiti. 😉

Bringing it all together

After spending a few weeks going back and forth we had the staging site to a point where we were ready to bring this beautiful blog over to it’s home. This process was so simple and smooth. HB Themes packaged up the theme so clean it made the transition so simple. It’s just another reason why WordPress and the themes sold on MOJO Marketplace are so incredibly flexible.

In short, they created a quick documentation file, a child theme and exported the settings and widget options for us to import right into the theme framework. Easy as pie.

Thank you HB Themes!

A big shout out to Branko and the HB Theme team! We couldn’t be happier to have you as a integral part of the MOJO community and it was a pleasure working together on this project together. The blog feels like a new playground for us to play in and we know this will provide everything we need to connect even further with our MOJO community!

Blog on! 😉