Darrell Vesterfelt and Tim StoddartA look behind the scenes at the shiny new Copyblogger.com redesign — and the return of Copyblogger comments!
Today, Copyblogger’s Sonia Simone joins our EVP of Educational Content, Pamela Wilson, and Head of StudioPress Lauren Mancke for a peek behind the curtain at Copyblogger.com.
More specifically, we’re talking about the brand-new site redesign. The new design has been a solid 9 months in the making. (And Pamela is really happy to finally get this baby delivered …)
For a business, smart design goes hand-in-hand with real-world objectives, and that’s the focus of our conversation.
In this 25-minute episode, the team talks about:
- How the new design reflects and serves changes in the business
- Explanations of some of the visual elements that create the new look and feel
- The conversation behind bringing comments back to the site
- Lauren’s thoughts on what to “steal” from the new design
- The tension between being in community and getting work done … (Nope, we didn’t resolve it!)
Listen to Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing below ...
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The Show Notes
- Pamela’s post on Design Thinking — how design reflects business decisions How to Use an Iterative Loop to Dominate Your Niche
- Our post about Why We’re Removing Comments on Copyblogger
- The announcement post for the new design, with additional features and elements you might want to check out Welcome to the New Copyblogger Website
- Pamela Wilson’s Twitter account: @pamelaiwilson
- Sonia Simone’s Twitter account: @soniasimone
- Lauren Mancke’s Twitter account: @laurenmancke
Thanks for sharing this behind the scenes information! The new design and layout looks awesome.
Like you, Sonia, I’m also reading Cal Newport’s new book “Deep Work”. My take on his suggestion about ‘quit social media’ is that it’s purely something that will give us a big leverage in terms of focused attention. Not that there can’t be value in the community our shared experiences that come from things like Facebook groups.
Cal’s friend Scott Young recently published a review of the Deep Work-book on his site. In it he writes:
“The most controversial rule Cal proposes is number three, which Cal titles: Quit Social Media.
Even though the bullet point is fairly dramatic, what Cal is actually proposing is much more modest: don’t join social media networks unless you have good reasons to believe the benefits are high. Joining because there might be some benefit ignores the cost of your attention and time…”
It has done nice insights. You can see the full review here if you’re interested: http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2016/01/20/deep-work
All the best,
David
Nice post.
Funnily, I was more onboard with Newport’s recommendation in the book before he started justifying it. 🙂 I think the blog post did a better job of unpacking the real issue — wanting to keep the connections, but doing that with moderation so you don’t lose your entire productive life to yet another flame war about carbs.
I’m still working on that one with Facebook. 🙂 But Twitter for me doesn’t lead down those rabbit holes. Everyone’s a bit different.
Pamela, are you saying the post’s date changes to reflect the last comment?
If ao is that for SEO reasons?
The post dates don’t change based on comments; if I recall correctly, what she mentioned is if we re-publish an earlier post, we edit it, update it, and then re-post with the fresh date.
Since the comments are only available for 7 days after the publication date, there wouldn’t really be any mechanism to update the date based on the comment date.
We publish so much fresh content that we have no reason to “fake” freshness for SEO purposes, but in any event we wouldn’t do that anyway. 🙂
Hi Hashim,
We change the date to reflect the day we’re republishing the updated post.
All previous comments appear below the post, and new comments are added with the date they were written.
Happy comments are back. They help to lower the fence between both sides of the site. This is what blogging is about.
I was wondering the same about refreshed posts. I’m preparing my site to take the same move since we talked about it in #CBChallenge. Removing or updating comments wouldn’t be authentic. So we will see groups of comment for each update. Would be good to add a specific comment saying “from here comments relates to first publication”. It will prevent readers to inadvertently re-engage on past threads.
You could easily just post in the comments each time the content is refreshed with a note to that effect. “Hey gang, just a reminder that this post was originally published on X date, so the comments before this one were made a year ago.”
I don’t think it’s necessarily always bad for readers to re-engage with an existing thread, though. If it was me, I’d probably observe how it’s working for you, and only put in some “corrective” measure if it seems to be needed.
I had always struggled with the comments section on my site since readers didn’t leave many comments, and those that did were “lightweight”, not really adding to the topic. So, when Copyblogger.com stopped comments then I felt the freedom and liberty to do it too. Eliminating comments cleaned up some precious real estate on my site. And really, there are plenty of sites that shouldn’t bother with comments especially when no one leaves them.
My recommendation to other bloggers is to take a hard look at that section, and, if all you see is “0 Comments” then be an editor and ditch them!
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