Photo by Vern Hart

You may have noticed that the face of this blog and my entire website has changed.

Kim Woodbridge played a huge role in making it happen!

I determined that I wanted to move the site to Headway, after seeing the blogs of people like Jim Connolly, Danny Brown, John Haydon, and hearing them explain how easy it is to work with Headway.

I’ve had a website forever. My first one was created by the son of a neighbor in the early days of computers. I never took it down. You can still see it here. You can tell how old it is by the software I listed. I didn’t really market it or use it after the initial few years.

My second site took forever to create (think 10 years) because I couldn’t get my head around what I wanted to say. I bought the domain and just kept renewing it. Even after I hired a local designer to set up the template, I couldn’t write the content. Finally, January 2009 with a push from a friend, I wrote the content and my designer launched the site on a server in Texas.

I had started my blog in October 2008 on a separate WordPress platform. In April 2009, I asked Kim if she could move the blog to the site and hired her for the first time. She got it ready to go but the export wasn’t working with my server so we ended up moving the whole site and blog to Hostgator. Everything was going well but that site was created in Dreamweaver and though I could work in it, it was, well… work.

Again, reading the positive comments about Headway made me very curious. I wouldn’t make a change though without support. Exporting your blog or website to a new site takes someone who understands the nuances of moving data and someone who can be trusted to troubleshoot for you.

Once again, I turned to Kim. She had not worked with Headway yet but that didn’t worry me because I know how quickly she learns. I asked her on Monday morning if I could hire her again and by Tuesday, she had a template ready to go. Kim and I talk by e-mail and Twitter DMs and we created this whole new site together that way.

I’m very hands-on. I knew what I wanted so after she told me it was up, I started playing. I changed colors using the easy to use Visual Editor and created new navigation. We communicated back and forth so we wouldn’t wipe out each others changes.

Kim transferred some of my content but then I rewrote it and decided to transfer the rest myself since it was essentially a cut and paste. I had to re-tweak some things and put the PayPal code back in but I had done all that in Dreamweaver myself so I knew I could do it again. Editing a page in Headway is like editing a blog post. In Dreamweaver, it was doable but more work.

Kim worked on the final details and we determined that we could go live on Saturday morning. Mind you, Kim and I were both working on other projects all week long. She had my project and others and I had my clients in addition to this site change. Still, in less than a week, we designed the new site and moved the old site and blog, and let it go live. I am sure there will be little things to fix because any big project does have a few issues to iron out but I know that I have help when I need it.

What I love about Headway is that I know that I can continue to tweak easily or even change all the colors etc. The site doesn’t have to go stale and wait until I have someone design a new template.

What I love about Kim is that I have a partner that let me have a role in creation of the site and yet was there to handhold me.

So… the Thank YOU goes to Kim!

Photo by Dave Hogg

With the advent of using Facebook to push out blog content, many people stop by opening it only in Facebook instead of going the to original post. When I started reading blogs, I didn’t use Facebook or Twitter. I went to one blog on the recommendation of bloggers I liked and then I moved on to others through the comment section — because bloggers also like to write comments.

If you read blogs only on the page that opens in Facebook or through e-mail, you miss the richness of the blogging community. Even bloggers like Seth Godin who no longer allow comments on his blog (due to the sheer volume of comments and time to answer them, I am told) are richer when you read them on the blog. The visual effects are usually better on the blog and you can use the navigation to read a post you might have missed by e-mail.

You miss the community that grows between bloggers themselves. I love Jim Connolly’s marketing advice for small and medium-sized businesses, but even more I love the way he shares the bloggers he enjoys, such as the post he wrote today (November 16) on Danny Brown. You’ll see Danny commenting on Jim’s blog, Jim commenting on Danny’s blog and get that sense of community, camaraderie, and humor that grows in the online world.

When you comment on Facebook, the conversation moves off the blog and onto the Facebook page and some of that community gets lost. I still talk to bloggers on Facebook but more likely about a random comment that one of them made on Facebook. On Saturday, I saw John Haydon make a comment, “I like the rain!” and Danny Brown quickly answer back, “But does the rain like you, ” and I had to respond with “You couldn’t resist, could you, Danny?” only because I have known Danny long enough through his blog and comments that I could almost see the twinkle in his eye when he wrote the comment to John.

The online world is as big or small as you make it. I treasure the fact that people I will never meet in person (most likely) have become real to me. I follow bloggers that speak about things I want to understand better or who are just fascinating writers that draw me in and captivate me with the genuineness of the posts. You won’t get to know them if you only read the Facebook version.

So — Always read the blog on the blog… and thanks for reading my post today!