Website Design: Bill Can Grill

The site’s focus is delicious backyard barbeque recipes. Not only does it contain barbeque recipes but the site also contains a wealth of barbeque tips and information for the passionate griller. The site was originally built using Movable Type with the same theme. However, the owner wished to move everything over to WordPress, including the theme and its random box border colors.

Features

Custom WordPress Theme – we call it 3D Color Splash.
Custom Logo – we used one small piece of clipart and an interesting typeface (font).
Custom php Functions – we created a small custom php function that controls the random box border colors.
Custom Graphics – we created the custom pictures of recipes used in the top horizontal box to randomly highlight recipes.
Search Engine Optimization – we used our proprietary method for finding niche keyword phrases that have low or virtually no competition in Google.

Bill Can Grill was created using simple HTML and CSS, including absolute positioning for the overlap of the boxes of the main content area as well as to create the 3D boxes that contain recipe images and navigation. We created a custom php function to add to the WordPress theme that randomly changes the color of each box (the horizontal rectangle box near the top of the page and the vertical horizontal box on the left of the page that contains the site’s navigation among other things) every time the page is refreshed. The orange background color was chosen because orange tends to stimulate the appetite, which is the whole purpose of the site… to get people thinking about food!

We installed several WordPress plugins to help make things work more smoothly as well as connect the site to Twitter and Facebook. Among them, the site uses the WordPress plugin Adserve to rotate the recipe images in the top horizontal box. The Wordbooker plugin is used to update the website owner’s Facebook profile whenever he adds a new recipe or article; likewise, the WP to Twitter plugin sends an update to Twitter with every update. Using the WP Wall plugin allows visitors to provide testimonials. Finally, of the more important plugins used, WPTouch iPhone Theme, provides a great mobile experience and allows grillers to get recipes right on their smartphones, which can be extremely useful when shopping for the barbeque or out at the grill and away from the computer.

Current Search Engine Rankings Rankings (as of 13 June 2010)

#1 in Google for delicious backyard barbeque recipes
#1 in Google for backyard barbeque recipes
#18 in Google for barbeque recipes
#1 in Google for delicious backyard barbecue recipes
#3 in Google for backyard barbecue recipes
#1 in Google for delicious backyard bbq recipes
#3 in Google for backyard bbq recipes
#1 in Bing for delicious backyard barbeque recipes
#1 in Bing for backyard barbeque recipes
#19 in Bing for barbeque recipes
#1 in Bing for delicious backyard barbecue recipes
#1 in Bing for backyard barbecue recipes
#1 in Bing for delicious backyard bbq recipes
#2 in Bing for backyard bbq recipes
#1 in Yahoo! for delicious backyard barbeque recipes
#3 in Yahoo! for backyard barbeque recipes
#1 in Yahoo! for delicious backyard barbecue recipes
#26 in Yahoo! for backyard barbecue recipes
#1 in Yahoo! for delicious backyard bbq recipes
#5 in Yahoo! for backyard bbq recipes

The website averages more that 700 visitors per month. As expected, there are fewer visits during the colder months and traffic peaks on holidays and weekends.