New Site Design
by John R. Sedivy
Achieving our six month anniversary, reaching 100,000 page views, and having developed over 100 articles are very special achievements to us. As we mentioned in the past while reaching other milestones, this would not be possible without our readers, both old and new. As we continue to evolve, and we experiment with varying styles, and I further find and strengthen my voice, I continue to appreciate the support of our readers and visitors to this website. The only guarantee is that we will continue to move forward and in turn strive to provide increased value to you, our readers.
In commemoration of these achievements we have launched a series of improvements that are meant to refresh our overall web presence as well as add more value to our readers. I will discuss each in greater detail, with each being the subject of a new article.
A Fresh Design
Although we enjoyed the past site design, change can be refreshing. In the spirit of positive change we have revamped the overall site design while maintaining the key elements. Specifically, we have removed the tree which was located at the top and sidebar. The colors have been updated and the CCBbuzz title maintained but refreshed with a new look and feel.
The CCB “Bee” has been updated from a static image, to a more refreshed, dynamic vector image which adds more life to the overall logo. The vector aspect also allows for more flexibility should we wish to improve upon the design in the future. For those non-technical types, vector images consist of many parts, each allow for individual modification whereas a static image is fixed and does not allow for modification.
In addition, we have reduced the overall logo footprint in order to move more content above the display fold, this will allow those giving the site a quick glance to read our logo, article title, and introduction to the article, all with a quick glance without having to scroll down. Once satisfied by your preview of the content, you may then scroll down to read the remainder of the article.
I believe these changes are an effective blend of old and new. Old in that we maintained the heritage “CCBbuzz” and “CCB Bee.” It is new in that we refreshed these images with a cooler look and feel to breathe additional life into these elements. I am particularly excited about the vector CCB Bee in that it allows for future redesign and is a drastic step forward from what we had. Kudos to Amy for all her time and effort on this redesign!
In closing, it is our hope that you are happy with the evolved look and feel of this website. It is our goal to provide our readers with a truly unique experience, combining solid content with a fresh element of industrial design. For a discussion on the benefits of industrial design, read my article “A Simple Yet Profound Question.” Happy reading and here’s to the next six months!
Our site design has evolved to effectively blend the old with the new!
-John R. Sedivy of Cape Cod Branding
6 Months and 100K
by John R. Sedivy
Today is significant for at least two reasons. First, today marks the six month mark of CCBbuzz – hard to believe that it was just this past December that we launched this blog! Second, as of noon Eastern Standard Time we had our 100,000th page view. Note that our present stat counter is off by roughly 23,000 page views, this is due to the stat counter being reset with our server migration after the first month. Read our series on Blog Server Migration for a discussion on the benefits of migrating from the WordPress server to a private server and how to accomplish this task.
Earlier this month I had also announced that we had released our 100th article, including this article we are now up to 114. Considering that many of these articles are above the 1,000 word mark this is a noteworthy accomplishment. All of this within six months!
Roots
Back in December we started this blog with the overall goal of driving traffic to our main Cape Cod Branding website. In the beginning we focused on marketing related topics that were specific to the overall competency of Cape Cod Branding. Within the first month, the blog took on a life of it’s own, attracting over 22,000 visitors! I began focusing more of my time on the blog, with Amy’s help and we explored a variety of topics. Amy will likely admit (without too much prodding) that I can be a bit scatter brained and have a wide variety of interests and curiosities – which this blog reflects.
A few of our topics include general business, our partnership, web traffic analysis, and social media. As we progressed we have explored other topics in this forum to include psychology, Freemasonry, and the New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers List to name a few. I find the Times list to be fascinating for the reason if you read the books on that list they are of a wide variety of topics and interests – it literally opens you up to whole new worlds. Initially when I started tackling the Times list I would stick to books strictly within my realm of interest, however recently I have been reading everything – even if does not remotely relate – with great results! I believe this approach will ultimately open me up to new readers and even more interesting topics.
Six Figures
It is funny how when you focus on something it seems to happen, although you may not know how. For more on the relationship between why and how read my article with the very same title. As we grew closer to the six month mark I had become increasingly fixated on hitting 100,000 page views within six months. For awhile it appeared that this would happen easily, but then there were a few setbacks, traffic dipped a bit and it did not appear likely. As this past week drew onward it appeared increasingly unlikely. As of yesterday we would have needed nearly three thousand views by the time I posted this article to claim credit.
To put this in context, our highest day for the month of May (prior to yesterday) was May 12th at 2,068 page views. For the remainder of the month we were hovering at about the mid-300 mark. Success did not seem likely at this point. Could lightning strike twice? In this case yes. Yesterday, I had posted our article outlining the relationship between why and how and the affect on our partnership (Read our article “The Key To Successful Business? Partnership.” for a discussion on the benefits of a complimentary partnership). Based on this response the article appeared wildly popular, ringing in our highest day for the month at 2,102 page views!
Momentum continued into the early morning and we hit our objective by noon today, June 1, 2009. My point is this, I just want to reiterate that sometimes you just can’t worry about how things will happen, just know that it will happen. This is not to say that you will not have to work hard, we worked really hard – working most of the weekend away. But it was a labor of love and in the end it all worked out. As a rational minded person these sorts of occurrences have been difficult for me to grasp, but I have seen it multiple times since starting this blog.
Given enough focus and determination you will reach your objective!
-John R. Sedivy of Cape Cod Branding
