I am thinking of completely nuking the layout of this blog and starting fresh, possibly using pre-generated themes that are already available. I’ve never been all that happy with the way this blog looks, and there are actual professional graphic designers who have made themes for Blogger that I can use. Plus the new Blogger themes are easy to tweak and you can add neat gadget thingies.
(Really I would just like to migrate this blog to tinysubversions.com and switch to WordPress, but my search engine ranking is just too good at this point to do that. Plus there are so many pages out there that link to my Effective Networking articles I wouldn’t want to mess with them.)
What do you, my readers, think? Obviously I will just be changing the look of the blog, the content will still be here (and it’s all backed up, just in case).
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Well I did think it had a lot less orange than I expected from you. :)
If it helps here's a Lifehacker article on moving from Blogger to Wordpress without losing your Google Rank: http://lifehacker.com/5357742/move-from-blogger-to-wordpress-without-losing-google-rank
Some of the comments even talk about how not to break links from other sites.
Hope that helps!
Sheri, that is incredibly helpful. Thank you.
http://lifehacker.com/5357742/move-from-blogger-to-wordpress-without-losing-google-rank
=)
Oddly enough Life Hacker was looking for you. I hope this helps. It is similar to what i have done for a few friends in moving them to wordpress.
Weird. That tutorial didn't explain anything about how it manages to avoid starting anew with PageRank, it just seemed to discuss migrating your blog. I guess the 301 redirects were implicit in there somewhere.
My one caveat would be to consider Serendipity (s9y.org) instead of WordPress. Of course I'm the only game dev blogger I know not using WP, but I've been impressed with its features out of the box and how easy it is to hack on.
I always read through RSS feeds, so I don't ever really visit the blog itself, I haven't seen what it looked like since Google Reader came out.
I think you should go for a change. One of your blog's strengths is that it's very memorable… but it achieves that more through shock than anything else, hah. I think if you can find a new theme that still retains some of that individuality – and I have no doubt that you can – then you should go for it.
You'll also have access to the Akismet spam filter for your comments if you switch to Wordpress, which I've always been extremely happy with. I don't know if there is an equivalent for your current system or not.
Quite simply: yes. Purdy it up.
One suggestion if you are thinking of to change your blogspot layout around is to move the toolbar on the left side. Every time I visit your site I'm thrown off for a second because everything is on the left!
Consult the inspiration wolf, he is your new i-ching:
http://www.juanpablopatino.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/inspiration_wolf.jpg
There's not only page-rank to worry about (which, in any case, I would like to think Google can handle, for 301's) — there's also the links to your blogger articles.
And we all hate it when bloggers break our links.
So address that, on a hunch, I googled:
meta redirect blogger
And the first hit speaks to you, with Javascript to automate the page-by-page redirection:
Personally, when it comes to websites, staring at the same ol' thing gets old.
I think changing an element (banner, for example) is a smart thing to do every few months. Give your readers something new to look at.
The entire theme should be changed rarely, but a change is certainly welcomed at some point. We wouldn't want to be staring at the same yahoo page from 1998.
So, yeah, mix it up. See what you can come up with.
Your readers don't read your blog because of your theme. If you're ready for a change, change it up.
I've wanted to retheme your blog since I first saw it… *shuffles*
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