WEBSITE CREDITS
The AUS120.com™ / seanobrien.com.au™ website was hand-crafted by Sean himself; through his media agency Brisbne. Over it’s 9 years of existence and numerous redesigns across multiple platforms, the site has been featured on some of the most prestigious design showcase and award websites on the web, including:
DESIGN
AUS120.com™ was made using the below Adobe Creative Suite products including:
- Photoshop CS6 – creating all images
- Illustrator CS6 – designing the ‘Sean O’Brien’ logo
- Dreamweaver CS6 – CSS/PHP/xHTML/jquery coding
- Premiere Pro CS6 – editing all the videos
Although the content has taken over 9 years to build up, the actual coding of this website from start to finish took only 14 hours. This is because I started ‘half-way’ by using an awesome theme template to begin with by Woothemes called ‘Upstart’ theme. You can see the theme in action here and see how much different my site is than the original.
SYSTEM
This website runs on the following CMS (content management system) and platforms and makes use of the following plugins:
- Wordpress 3.8 (CMS)
- PHP 5.2.9 (PHP server version)
- MAXCDN – content delivery network
- W3TC Plugin – to connect Wordpress to the CDN
This website is using a CDN to deliver all the images/scripts/content to you faster. A CDN caches a copy of all the website files on multiple servers around the world so that you will only be viewing the files that are hosted the shortest distance from you! I am using MAXCDN for this purpose.
STATISTICS & TRAFFIC
Since launching the AUS120.com™ website in 2004, this site has enjoyed quite steady traffic over the years. Some of the ways I’ve used to keep visitors coming back to the site include redesigning the whole site almost yearly and updating the content style that I push on the Tour-Diary blog as well as writing daily reports at the major international windsurfing events; something which barely any of the pro riders out there do themselves.
AWARDS
In 2009 a revision of this site’s design using another Wootheme ‘template’ won a web-based design competition. The theme being used was ‘Aperture’ and you can see the details of the competition here and a photo of the award winning design here.
Various revisions of this website have been featured on many CSS Design and showcase websites including CSSelite.com, CSSremix, LightonDark.com, CSShive.com, CSSmania.com, InspirationTime.com, to name a few.
Statistics
Although the traffic to this website seems to be seasonal (ie, more viewers when it’s summer and there’s “actual” windsurfing going on!), I have managed to consistently generate a large amount of traffic to this website for a personal site. Above are a few statistics from one of the better months for traffic!
