I must be the luckiest boy in the whole wide world! About six months ago, after briefly retiring from this blog, I relaunched this site as a group blog. With the help of Paul Chaney, I assembled a crack team of co-bloggers, and those of you who read this blog regularly know that the result has been one of the best resources on the topic of using blogs in a business and marketing capacity out there, if I do say so myself.
Well, this weekend marked a great new milestone. If you visit us regularly, you’ve probably already noticed, we got a significant face lift. Like the site itself, the relaunch was the effort of several folks, so here are some shout outs.
First, after months of bitching about TypePad’s flaky service of late, we’ve made the switch to WordPress. Much as I love the folks and products over at Six Apart, I felt it was as much as anything a good chance to get to know a new publishing platform. What I’ve seen of it so far, I like. Jeremy Wright led the WP installation effort.
Josh Hallett did the work on the new CSS template design, which I personally thinks kicks serious ass. Stephan Spencer then tweaked the hell out of the site with all sorts of Web 2.0 type features, inclucing the ability for readers to bookmark every post on del.icio.us, track links to posts in Technorati, the ability to email posts to a friend (using this plug-in), the ability to add Technorati tags on the fly to posts, displaying those tags in a tag cloud, Swicki search, and more (Stephan, please feel free to elaborate). Finally, Tris Hussey pitched in and made himself generally useful, helping import the old archive into WordPress, among other things.
Thanks to all these guys, all our fabulous contributors and, most of all, all of our loyal readers, for making this site something worth reading every day!
Another Blog Design: Business Blog Consulting…
The revamped Business Blog Consulting group blog debuted over the weekend. Rick has all the details. I provided the design work. I’ve been doing quite a bit of blog design work recently :-)……
Trackback by hyku | blog - Josh Hallett — January 9, 2006 @ 10:04 am
I should have also noted that lots of the tweaks, particularly those Stephan implemented, were designed for SEO purposes. I’d love Stephan to elaborate here on his thinking for some of these tweaks.
Comment by Rick E. Bruner — January 9, 2006 @ 10:59 am
I knew things looked a little different around here — and it’s looking pretty spiffy 🙂
Congratulations on your recent move and redesign.
Comment by Teli Adlam — January 9, 2006 @ 12:49 pm
Rick, Thanks very much. Stephan really pulled this together … fixing permalinks, DB queries, etc.
I tell you WP 2’s MT importer does a pretty good job (the WP accounts are created, for example) but we had to do a lot of clean up (I accidentially created duplicate accounts which I had to manually merge).
Still this is a great case study for the cost of moving. I know that if Stephan and Josh and Jeremy hadn’t been around … I think much screaming would have been going on and it might not have come to pass.
Comment by Tris Hussey — January 9, 2006 @ 6:13 pm
[…] As Rick mentioned, I’ve lent a hand with the recent blog revamp. One of those things is to help search engine optimize (SEO) this blog a bit more. I’m just in Phase 1… there’s plenty more left to do. Here’s a recap on what’s been done: […]
Pingback by Search Engine Optimizing This Blog : Business Blog Consulting — January 10, 2006 @ 6:26 am
I know I need to change from a free blog service to a paid one where you get all the xtras that can mean so much to SEO. I was debating between Typepad and WordPress and I think you have tipped the balance for me.
Comment by Steve Harold — January 20, 2006 @ 5:11 am
The Irony of TypePad’s Performance…
Not too long ago TypePad lost a race with trying to move to a new data center because our old data center had literally run out of power. We had tons of rack space, just no juice. Nada. Nothing. It……
Trackback by majordojo — February 9, 2006 @ 8:01 pm