Welcome to the New Site!
Well, after many evenings working on the new site in our development environment, we’re finally ready to put down our tools and go live! We hope you like it!
You’ll find that most of the content hasn’t changed (in fact, all of our old posts are still here). You’ll also find that some things aren’t quite ready for prime time yet. Those features will either be described as in progress or they might just not work at all. If you find them, feel free to leave a comment on this post and we’ll make sure to address them when we can. (This will be especially true over the next 7 days as we’re working on the most critical components of the roll out).
New Features on One Project Closer
The bulk of the upgrade to our site is about the graphical presentation. We really wanted to have a theme for the site that captured the DIY spirit of our blog. We used the redesign to add a few new features to our blog that we’re real happy with. Here they are, in no particular order:
- Home Improvement Coupons List – Have you ever walked away from a purchase at one of the big box home improvement stores to think to yourself: I could’ve gotten that cheaper… We have, and that’s why we created the Home Improvement Coupons List. See that links for more info.
- Community Blogs – This feature will display the latest articles from around the DIY blogosphere. We haven’t finished this functionality yet. When we do, you’ll see it become active on the home page. For now, you can visit HouseBlogs, or Home Owners Like Us.
- Featured Content – This new area on the home page will highlight the most interesting content from our blog, and from other DIY blogs & sites around the web. It will also display the latest Home Improvement Giveaways running on our site (to make it easier for you to find and enter the contests!)
- Author Pictures – Since we have four authors here at OPC, we decided it would be much easier for our readers to get to know us if they could put a name with a face. Just look at the bottom of any post to see who wrote that article.
- E-mail & Print Options for Articles – This feature is *close* to implemented. We’re still working some of the HTML and plugin options. It will allow readers to print / e-mail any article on the site that they find particularly useful or interesting.
Special Thanks
We want to say a special thanks to Brian Gardner for his Revolution Themes. We bought Brian’s Revolution Music theme for Wordpress and customized it to look like what you see here. Shortly thereafter, Brian discontinued the original Revolution Themes (including Music) in favor of new Revolution Two themes. Brian is considering bringing back the original themes in 2009. We think this is an excellent idea and hope that he does just that!
What do you think? Let us know what you think of the new design!
Photo courtesy of fauxto_digit.
Comments & Conversation on this Article...
9 Responses to Welcome to the New Site!
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December 28th, 2008 12:46 pm
Looks great!
December 28th, 2008 6:00 pm
Very nice, guys! Look wonderful and can’t wait to spend more time in your “new digs” this year.
Happy 09!
December 28th, 2008 7:27 pm
Fred,
The new site is really awesome!!!! Far better than the previews and quite an impressive benefit to your readers!!! Congratulations on the new site.
December 28th, 2008 8:20 pm
Ethan, looks great! Lots of new features and such, nice interface.
December 28th, 2008 9:43 pm
@Paul, Thanks. I’m glad you like it. Really, the credit should go to Fred. He’s been tackling most of the back-end updates. Let us know if you bump into glitches though.
December 29th, 2008 12:08 am
I love the new look!
December 29th, 2008 11:15 pm
Many thanks for the compliments. We’re real excited to be in our new diggs… In particular, I’m excited about working more on the house and writing about it and not doing so many updates to the site
January 9th, 2009 9:14 am
I love the new site design.
The author photos on the bottom of the articles is especially good given that you are running a multiple author blog. It’s something that I want to do on some of my non-renovation sites.
Keep up the good work, I love seeing how the blog has developed and look forward to the community blog section getting up and running.
January 31st, 2009 12:20 am
[...] December 27 we made the move to our new diggs (this great new theme), and on January 13 we started our beta trial of our community blogs listing. [...]