My brother is an oceanographer. Part of his gig involves learning a bunch of stuff that very few people understand. To address this, he created Open Ocean, a site that is dedicated to mainstreaming oceanography.

Take a look. It’s pretty rad.

I started my Monday by going to the only place in the world where I allow myself to get punched in the face – an MMA school near my house. (Used to get beat up at home too – Stephanie isn’t allowed to drink tequila any more though, so we’re all good).

After getting the class schedule, I gave the owner a bit of crap for not having a very good web site – even when I search for their name online I can’t find their friggin’ site. Not good. She, agreed and asked if I do web design, to which I said “hell no!”

(You can tell by looking around BGD that I’m not much good with this stuff. Take a look-see at this web site. Nothing fancy. No customizations. I’m sure I’m not using half the plugins I could (or should) be using. I’ve always been more on the deal-making side of the business. Of course, now that I’m trying to get things going on my own, it has become necessary to get in the trenches a bit more.)

After telling my sensei’s wife that I wasn’t up for the gig, I got to thinking – How long would it take this guitar player/bizdev guy to re-create a web site using WordPress? I decided to find out.

We started with this site: http://martialartslv.com

The goal was to use as much of their content as possible, not adding any bells and whistles, but clean the site up a little bit, get some data capture happening, make it a bit more user friendly and maybe get some very basic SEO and a site map going.

Total time to complete: 64 minutes. Here’s the timeline:

3.16pm talk to susie, bitch about her website.

3.18pm decide to try and make her one that isn’t as shitty, very quickly.

3.19pm start searching for domains.

3.20pm decide that lasvegasdojo.com would be perfect.

3.21pm what if I want to use the .com for a review site though? I give her the .info, point nameservers to MT account.

3.25pm start WP install, add lasvegasdojo.com to my list of projects that will never ever get completed.

3.27pm wait for the nameservers to move over. Damn you, GoDaddy.

3.32pm WP install complete, searching for template.

3.34pm template chosen.

3.34pm pause to talk to buddy about headaches and dog adoptions.

3.46pm back on my game – lots of content covered in a 12 minute conversation.

3.47pm pulling down images, copying content, building pages to match old site.

4.01pm legacy site loads pretty fucking slow. i’m waiting…..

4.35pm ….and I’m done.

The finished product can be viewed here: http://www.lasvegasdojo.info

Because I was trying to do this quickly (and because their current fighters and schedule are not available online), those pages are place holders. The rest is good to go though.

Any of you more established WP gurus have any suggestions for making this thing better on the cheap?