Regular visitors will have noticed a rather drastic redesign of the site which went live today. I felt it was time to overhaul my theme once again and I think the new design is a lot cleaner and less cluttered than the previous four column theme which I’ve used for the past two years.
The format of the site has reverted to a more blogging oriented style and the hosting directory page has been replaced as the home page by recent and highlighted posts. The directory is still here, and can be found in the header links, as can the customer review pages and the sitemap.
On the whole, everything that was here before is still here and I’m still working on cleaning up the categories and getting rid of some deprecated posts in certain areas. All that has really been sacrificed is a lot of the third party javascript and advertising which is probably no bad thing from a reader’s perspective. There are still a few rough temporary graphics which will also be smartened up in the days ahead. Everything seems to be working as it should but of you do notice any problems please leave a comment or use my contact form to let me know about it.
The next major change will be the importation of all the content from my marketing blog, followed by that site’s demise. I have been pondering the future of that old NucleusCMS blog for many months and have decided that running it alongside this one is just creating extra work for nothing and that the time really has come to merge the two. Moving the blog itself to WordPress is an overly complicated and problem fraught venture that I am not prepared to take on.
What will this merger mean for visitors? Well, the content of this site will expand somewhat to take in the affiliate and internet marketing related stuff that I’ve always kept on the Nucleus site and visitors to the old blog will find themselves redirected here once I’m finished with the merger. It will also mean the loss of the comments from the old blog and some short term mess following the import of all the posts – missing images and category problems are the most likely so that will probably take a while to fix as there are a lot of posts to be checked and edited.
For me it will probably mean the loss of some RSS subscribers which is a pain but the benefits to me outweigh the disadvantages. For one thing, I will no longer need to keep abreast of two blogging platforms and for another, the SEO benefits of moving everything across to WP will hopefully soon become apparent.
Nucleus is a good platform but in terms of SEO and design, it lags far behind WordPress and its huge user and developer community. The old blog looks just that – old, and tired and without spending a considerable amount of money on a redesign, it wasn’t about to change.
It is my hope that readers of the marketing blog will come across to this site where they will still find me blogging on the topics that interest them. For those of you already reading, thank you, and please let me know if you prefer, like or dislike the new layout – I think it is much more in keeping with 2010 than the old clothes 
April 3, 2010
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