Highlight and Share: a Branding and Admin Refresh

First, a narrative…

First Contact

I came across Holly about a year and a half ago. She landed in my Twitter DMs. She was having an issue getting Highlight and Share working with her Elegant Themes site. I went over to the site, inspected the divs, and told her which CSS class to put in her settings. Super easy peasy from a support perspective.

She ended up leaving a kind review. And that was that.

Second Contact

Fast forward a year and a half to the present and she DMs me concerned. She was concerned I had abandoned Highlight and Share. I let it slip through a few versions of WordPress. It was a plugin that was in a state of neglect. It was still working for me, and it only has about 2,000 users, so it slipped into whatever territory.

After I shared why I have been neglecting it, she linked me to a LinkedIn group where the concern was public.

I was like, crap. So I did the bare minimum and updated the Tested Up To portion of my readme after several tests to make sure it still works. I also use it on my own site, so I’m confident that it wouldn’t break anything.

Holly was thankful I updated it as she could update the group.

Third Contact

After getting Highlight and Sharing enabled on her site, she noticed a few major bugs with the plugin. The Copy link didn’t work for all the variations (text, inline-highlight, block). WhatsApp and LinkedIn no longer worked. They received new endpoints.

So I fixed those bugs. And I was set from there. But I had a thought. What if I could give Highlight and Share a rebrand? Document it better. Have a proper landing page. I’m thinking, “It has 2,000 users. It’s not worth it.” But I needed a “mental” break from the plugin I was coding.

As I thought about it more, I thought a little sprucing up might make it look better on paper.

The Rebranding

Creating Admin UIs kinda excite me. I figured I could practice with a refresh of Highlight and Share. What could go wrong? 🙂

I didn’t like the existing logo, so after what seemed like an endless search for one, I finally settled on something that is a share icon with a human aspect to it.

I got the icon on Adobe Stock. Speaking of which, I can’t remember if I already have the extended license or not.

I refreshed the font family of the masthead and settled for something darker so brighter colors stand out more without being too overwhelming.

Here’s the old one:

And here’s the new one:

After that, I felt like Forrest Gump; I had come this far. Gotta keep running.

Soooooo… I decided to write a bunch of documentation and refresh the admin panel.

Writing the docs took so much longer than refreshing the admin. I had already decided on a color palette, so the admin refresh was mostly proper containers and CSS.

For brevity, here’s the old admin panel:

And here’s the new one:

So that’s that!

As far as Holly? I got her stamp of approval.

Oh yeah…

Just a mini-announcements of sorts. I spun off a plugin business called DLX Plugins from MediaRon. I brought over four plugins. QuotesDLX will be its first premium plugin.