If you don’t know Dan Lyons you may know his alter-ego, Fake Steve Jobs. Dan Lyons is a technology columnist for Newsweek and the creator of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

Dan decided it was time to walk away from Fake Steve, but still needed an outlet to discuss what's on his mind. We were initially referred to help get things started with a blog, but as we talked with Dan it became apparent we could help get him going with his entire personal website.

We created RealDanLyons.com for Dan to promote not only his blog, but his speaking engagements, books and articles. The site pulls inspiration from his new employer, Newsweek and in the interest of keeping things light and personal, Dan provided us images to use that were not the typical headshot (big thanks to Jeremy for those design skills).

WordPress & WordPress.com VIP Hosting

The site uses WordPress for management of posts as well as pages. We also made extensive use of widgets within WordPress to control the sidebar which changes through the different sections of the site.

A first for us with this project was using WordPress.com’s VIP Hosting to host the site. This didn’t mean much difference for us in the development of the site except we know we don’t have to worry about high traffic days on the site, they do. We still developed the site in a local staging environment running a standard install of WordPress. They assisted in taking things from staging to production and now future updates to the site are a matter of committing updates to a SVN repository. Nice. A huge thanks to Raanan, Nick and Lloyd over at Automattic for the help in getting things up on VIP.

Being a fan of Fake Steve made this a particularly exciting project to work on and if we can be a part of ensuring that Dan Lyons keeps writing posts like this we’re all for it.

See more of our work over in the portfolio.