Jackie is on her way back from her sister’s and asked me to kick this off. Over the past week we’ve been working on not just a new theme, but a handful of changes to help improve the site. For those that are interested, here are the details:
- New Template/Theme:The overall site changed in format – the front page will have a slightly different layout.
- Built in ShareThis: Previous ShareThis relied on a plugin that caused the performance issues. New one is part of the template.
- Ads: As we discussed before, we’re adding a few ads to the sidebar to help the site pay for itself.
- Permalinks Changing: To help the site show up better in search engines, we’re changing the url to /postID/Title rather than /year/month/day/postID. Normally this would break links, but we’re using a plugin to help redirect you to the right place. Help us keep an eye out for broken links, and update any that you have that are pointing to us.
- SEO Plugin: Again, this will help us show up in search engines. Don’t worry, it’ll be whitehat SEO, not blackhat.
- Front page Excerpts: The front page will contain Excerpts rather than full articles. This is done to help save on bandwidth costs. Further tweaks will probably be made.
I’m really hoping no one sees this as LE jumping the shark. The goal is to cut costs and make the site more usable; If you see any issues, please let us know. As far as the ads go, we have placeholders for the time being; we’ll try to keep them relevant and unobtrusive.
The Master and Overlord or better known as the hubby who keeps LE running. He rarely reviews, but he's the one who keeps everything running smoothly from the IT perspective.
It looks great! :)
Thank you for letting us know. Jackie’s site is terrific.
We’re still going to be making a few changes since I’m still finding a few bugs. So please please please let me know if there is anything broken or not rendering properly. Thanks!
Looks super, a lot cleaner. The toolbars look more user friendly.
Damnit….advertisement is spelled wrong. I’m going to have to fix that image, aren’t I. :(
Damnit…advertisement is spelled wrong. I’m going to have to fix that image, aren’t I. :(
Elie – yeah, I had a lot of links in my sidebar and I wanted to get that cleaned up. That was one of the reasons I wanted a new design. I had to take out Blog and Author links, but I have pages for those already, so a lot of that was duplicative.
Looks good Jackie! Question for you on the ads, my template has a place already set up for ads. BUT..with google adsense, if you don’t like how it looks can you just jump ship?
You know, I had totally forgotten about my Google Ads until you said that. Honestly, I haven’t seen a dime from putting those ads up. I want to say it’s totally your call if you participate in the program or not, so if you take them down, you’re just not earning anything.
I thought as much, ahh well a blogger could try;)