Case study
Brian Dorey Project Blog
The Brian Dorey blog: a custom blog for electronics, home automation and DIY projects that has been publishing for twenty years.
- Services provided
- Website design, Responsive design, CMS integration (Atlas CMS), UX/UI design
- Built
- 2006
The Challenge
Brian Dorey, one of the owners of Apexweb, builds things: electronics, smart-home systems, solar power installations, 3D-printed and machine projects. Documenting them properly takes more than a few paragraphs. A good project write-up needs photographs, diagrams, sometimes video, and room to explain what worked and what did not.
A blog that is going to run for years also needs structure. Many posts across many subjects have to stay findable, so a reader looking for one project can reach it quickly, and the author can publish without fighting the software.
Our Approach
We built the blog on a custom CMS, designed around long, detailed project posts. The site is clean and uncluttered and reads well on a phone or a desktop, with a layout that makes detailed tutorials comfortable to follow for extended periods. Its main features are:
- Categories with post counts, from electronics and home automation to solar power, Raspberry Pi, photography, radio, Arduino and programming
- Detailed posts with images, step-by-step explanations and an estimated reading time
- A gallery and a videos page
- Tools and converters, and a page of resources and links
- A link through to a companion blog covering retro computers
The Results
The blog gives its author a dependable place to publish and gives readers several ways in: browse a category, scan the latest posts or open a project they have heard about. The same system handles everything from a short update to a sixteen-minute-read project write-up.
Long-Term Impact
The blog has now been publishing for twenty years, and marked the anniversary with a post on the site itself. Over that time it has grown into a large library of electronics and DIY projects, because the content is kept in a CMS rather than in individual pages.
If you want a blog or knowledge base that can grow for years, see how we build websites or get in touch.
Visit the Brian Dorey Project Blog website (opens in a new tab)
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