Scenario: Translucent, Inc. had an image problem. They wanted their customers to understand what they stood for, but were unable to communicate their values effectively. At one point a major glitch occurred in their best selling product and it took months for the PR manager to set things straight.
Business Logs
Going Once…Going Twice…
Business Logs has been SOLD! Mike has previously talked about putting it up on the auction block, and in mid-March this hot property was snapped up by blog entrepreneur Mark Saunders of Splashpress Media. Business Logs now joins a family that includes such sites as Performancing, The Blog Herald, Jack of All Blogs, Tubetorial, Cutline, and many blog-related sites. Suffice it to say that it’s in good hands.
Two of the biggest concerns with the sale were (1) keeping the high-quality blog going, and (2) continuing to offer awesome blog design services for clients.
To resolve those concerns, Mark brought in the company I work for, Forty, a well-known web design and development firm based (proudly) in Phoenix, Arizona. We’ve been designing and blogging since the old days, and have worked quite a bit with Mike in the past.
From here on out, we’re going to be managing the site, as well as overseeing the blog design work for Business Logs clients. We’ll also be working with Mike to give the site a fresh new look, and port it over from Movable Type (old and busted) to WordPress (new hotness!).
For blog audiences, change sucks. Right now, you’re probably thinking, “Aw, crap, B-Logs is going to go right down the tubes.” We totally understand and respect that. We’d probably be thinking the same thing if we didn’t already know how awesome it’s going to be!
We really believe this will be a good thing for everyone involved. Mike will get to spend more time with 9rules, his biggest crush apart from his fiancee. You, the reader, will continue to receive awesome blog-related content from the guys here at Forty, as well as several guest bloggers (including Mike from time to time). And, for our part, we’ll get to know you guys, which is a reward unto itself.
So, that’s the news from here at Business Logs headquarters. We’re still in the middle of getting everything sorted out, so please forgive any minor hiccups over the next week or two. In the meantime, please feel free to tear us apart in the comments. 🙂
Selling Business Logs
Update 3/16: Hey everybody, the site has been purchased for an agreed upon amount (higher than the initial bid, closer to the BIN) so the auction is officially closed. Thank you for all the interest and support! I’m staying on to write a bit for the next 3 months plus the redesign is coming soon. Stay tuned 🙂
Since the inception of 9rules back a few SXSW festivals ago, my goal was to work on it full-time or nearly full-time as soon as it was possible. Over the past several months I’ve been slowly transitioning out of client work and doing more 9rules-related activities, and now I feel that selling Business Logs is the last piece of the puzzle that will allow me to do what I’ve always wanted.
To be honest, there’s another reason I’m selling the site and it’s that I’m burnt out with the Web 2.0 industry, or more specifically, writing about the Web 2.0 industry. For awhile I’ve felt that a lot of companies lack that “oomph” that will push them over the top, and instead of constantly being the devil’s advocate and harping on them, I want to spend more time putting my money where my mouth is and making sure that 9rules is a success. Talking through a new section of 9rules with Paul and Tyme is 100x more rewarding than writing a blog entry on venture capital, so that’s where my focus is going to go.
Traffic
As mentioned in the Sitepoint auction, this site gets more traffic when I write vs. when I don’t write (just like most blogs) and based on the last 12 months of pageview statistics, the average per month is 50k pageviews but will surpass 100k for this month easily. I’ve never been obsessed with traffic coming to this site, but considering I’ve only been writing a few times each month recently, I don’t think it’s too bad and could get a lot higher with some additional articles.
Free Redesign
Upon completion of the sale, I will be working with the new owner on a redesign that will most likely be more content-centric and less one-author-personal-portfolio style. I think it’ll be surreal to be redesigning this site for someone else, but I’m sure it’ll be fun 🙂
Most Popular Articles
- Mark Cuban Fined for Weblog Entry – One of my first tastes of viral linkage, this entry was written almost three years ago but continues to pull nice Google traffic (#3 for mark cuban weblog) and was linked from dozens of places including an ESPN.com article.
- Lean XHTML and Precise CSS – One of many CSS-related articles I’ve written over the years, this one happened to be the most popular. (Related: My 5 CSS Tips, another very popular entry.)
- iWeb-Generated Source Code is Awful – After iWeb was released by Apple, I stumbled upon the HTML it outputted and thought they could do a lot better. This entry was linked from a variety of Mac sites because I believe I was the first person to check out the source behind iWeb’s web wizardry and blog about it.
- Digg and YouTube Powering Atheism 2.0 – I had the idea for this entry kicking around for awhile, and once I wrote it, it was nice to see it got so much attention.
- Returning The Favor: The Toyota Mashup Challenge! – After learning that an ad agency that works for Toyota stole the 9rules logo I had some fun with their logo in return.
- Movable Type vs. WordPress, My Opinion – I’ve been an MT user for awhile, but because 9rules uses WP for parts of the backend I’ve recently had a nice mixture of both so I thought a comparison review would be helpful.
What’s Next
Lots of fun 9rules stuff. Oh yeah, and a wedding to pay for. Did I not mention that at the beginning? 🙂
The Next 9rules: Focusing On Content and Value
People visit blogs because of the interesting content, well at least I do. The extraordinary growth of blogs in the past year could be attributed to many factors, but one factor I like to think about is that more information is now available to everyday citizens because of the Internet, and more regular people now have the opportunity to voice their opinions via their blogs. More information, more people online, more opinions. However, more people and more blogs means that more people read blogs and are itching to find good ones, and that concept was the beginning of 9rules. People are looking for good content to read, and we want to find and present that content to them.
9rules is focused on content, but what exactly is this content and who is producing it? This new version of 9rules has essentially three different types of focused, topical content available for readers to check out:
Member Articles
The foundation of 9rules is based around our strong network of members (now at 260+) and the great content they generate. Members are organized into Communities (Programming, Entertainment, Comics, etc.) and their blog entries are aggregated in two main areas: the homepage and on their Community pages. Out of the 260 members about 20% will publish an entry on any given day, so throughout all 7 days of the week we have fresh content from our members. We don’t try to suck readers in with internal 9rules links to their content — we link directly to their articles and sites to maximize the traffic going there.
Featured Blog Articles
Our 9rules Featured Blog is a weblog run on the 9rules site that is written and edited by members. The entries are categorized by Community and focus on great content throughout the Network (written by other members) and the blogosphere (written by anybody.) We have individual Featured Blogs for each Community, with all the entries aggregated into our main Featured Blog and on the homepage.
9rules Notes
9rules Notes is our brand new, third type of content. Notes is based on normal forum software, however each individual forum thread and reply is styled to look like a normal weblog entry, so it appears as though you’re writing blog entries that are directly published onto 9rules.com. Each Community has its own Notes section (Design, Photography, etc.) where anyone can post topical entries that show up directly on that Community’s main page. Newly posted or replied to Notes are also featured directly on our homepage, with a direct link to the author’s URL of choice. The Notes installation is pretty basic right now, however full forum functionality will be added soon including user profiles, favorites, RSS feeds, and a lot more.
Circular Value
If the main 9rules site were nothing of any value, then we wouldn’t be drawing any traffic and would therefore not be doing our job which is highlighting (and moving traffic to) 9rules member sites. The premise of our company is that we provide value at our own 9rules.com website — enough to bring visitors in — and then we give them a multitude of ways to explore content and then eventually leave our site and visit a member. Unlike other “portals” (nasty word!) where they try desperately to lock visitors into their site, we make our living moving traffic off our site for the reasons stated above.
There are two basic types of user sessions involved when someone visits 9rules:
- They went to a weblog they liked and started browsing around. After reading some content they found a 9rules leaf logo on the sidebar and decided to click it.
- They go to 9rules.com and browse around, trying to find a site. They visit some Communities, read some entry titles, and then click on a title to visit a member blog.
We have to provide enough functionality and value on 9rules.com to 1) let 9rules readers find a blog they want to read, and 2) have people who come to the site for the first time (presumably by clicking on a member’s leaf logo) find enough things they like to keep coming back. With member entries, Featured articles, and now Notes, we have three different types of topical content ready for them to check out.
Design Growth, or, You Can’t Stay Web 2.0 Forever
Some of the feedback we’re receiving about this new design mentions that our new look isn’t as “Web 2.0” as before, and we’re taking that as a huge plus. Gone are the light pastels and the rounded corners; new design features include darker colors and a focus on functionality instead of superfluous design elements. The new design actually harkens back to our design from June of last year, back when we only had about 30 members. Replace 30 members with 30 communities and you’ve got a design that’s similar architecturally. We truly had to ditch the old design because if you broke the pixels down you’d see that we wasted a lot of screen real estate on non-content elements like gigantic rounded headers, huge RSS pull boxes, and rounded containers. Too much talk and not enough walk, and every single design iteration we go through we try to fit as much “walk” in as we can.
In this new homepage design, there are no superfluous design elements that aren’t there for a purpose: decisions guided the placement of every pixel, and every pixel has meaning. Our focus is now on Communities so naturally we needed a way to get users into a specific Community as fast as possible, and the list navigation on the top was the best way we came up with. A dropdown hides options, an inline link list is difficult to skim, and if we skipped the list it would take two clicks for a user to find the subject they want. Also, on the bottom of every page (except the homepage) is another community browser for quick access no matter where they are.
We thought pretty hard about this design, simply because we know this architecture and design will be staying with us for awhile as we grow out our new features. Here are a few small design elements you might not have noticed:
- Colors matter. Green titles are for blog entries, red titles are for the Featured blog, and blue titles are for Notes. On a Community page we use the same color scheme to denote the sections of content on the page, without resorting to large colored boxes or vertically wasteful and gigantic headers.
- Member focused. One of the problems we’ve had in the past (and still have to some extent) is unrelated content. A member might write about Apple 70% of the time and be a member of the Apple Community, but the other 30% they’re probably writing about their job, or what they ate for lunch, or the car they just bought. The way our site was setup, all those entries would get dropped into “Latest Entries” for the Apple Community, and it would throw off readers looking for entries about Leopard or the iPod nano. We contemplated some advanced filtering techniques, category RSS feeds, member tagging, 9rules site pinging, but in the end we found none of those really solved the problem, and that was that we were highlighting the wrong thing. A quick entry title may have absolutely nothing to do with what the entry is about, and readers won’t figure that out until after they click. What we did in this new version is highlight members and member sites instead of simply the “Latest Entries” from a given community. Now we have member listings with a screenshot, some member information (profiles are coming!), and the last 5 posts from the member, all of which let the reader make a more informed choice about just where they’ll be placing their outbound click.
- Notes Tagging. We’ve silently implemented tagging into 9rules Notes just so we can observe and tweak before we yell it from the rooftops (which we won’t do anyway.) It’s useful because a tag can span across multiple Communities, so it’s a quick meta-search for people looking for very specific content. Here’s the “web” tag with my cartoonish-looking title 🙂
So there you have it! New design, new features, smarter layout, and more functionality. Good stuff 🙂