KimKardashian.com (later held under the Celebuzz! umbrella) was the personal celebrity life blog of the famous Kim Kardashian. The site was packed with content from Kim’s life, including her family members, until Chris built their sites too. Cool features include high-availability, improved gallery and search handling, seasonal theming and admin tools, advertising and affiliate integrations, and social feed customization. This site had almost a million visitors a year at peak, and elevated Kim’s brand to superstardom!
The Celebuzz! team engaged Chris to implement a new site design, site organization, re-categorization, image optimization, search improvements, and much, much more for this celebrity life site because of his stellar work on their core site. Frontend improvements included specialized image gallery presentation, user search improvements, customized social feed integrations, merchandise shop, automated social sharing mechanisms, and fancy animations littered throughout the site.
In addition, Chris worked with the Celebuzz! sysAdmin team to improve the overall deployment flows. Automated tooling was created special for this site, and several backend services used to publish automatically to Kim’s social platforms. This celebrity life was well documented using all the tools Chris created for the site. His theme and functionality was used for almost a decade which shows the quality of his work!
Highlights from Services Provided for this Celebrity Life
Development & Implementation
- Collaborated on a design with Celebuzz’s & Kim’s vision in mind
- Implemented the new site design and a ton of frontend & backend improvements
- Theme creation, setup, and admin tools
- Improved photo gallery display and browser compatibility
- Implemented uncommon, but effective, SEO markup to improve search rankings
- Invented a multisite platform on top of WordPress which the site was later managed with
- many, many more features
Maintenance
- Daily updates and improvements
- Iterative improvements on site speed
- 1-minute granularity backups and recoveries
- Hosting setup and management
- Third-party service replacements and improvements
- Completely automated deployment workflows and tooling
- Invention of CI/CD deployment tools, before they were popular
Security
- Comprehensive WordPress security analysis & report
- Server & Services setup and routine auditing
- Password policy creation & enforcement
- Firewall level client blocking
- Round the clock security monitoring
- HTTPS setup and maintenance
Custom Themes & Plugins
- Completely custom, high-availability tuned theme
- Admin improvements for staff efficiency of this celebrity life blog
- Caching & security plugins
- Admin tools to control celebrity gallery pages
- Site organization and optimization plugins
- Search algorithm that highlighted specific events and family members
- Custom post types for Events, Galleries and more
Hosting Setup
- Evaluation of hosting setup and costs
- Training for hosting optimization and automation
- Integration of CDN and CDN APIs
- Server level optimizations that lead to huge speed gains