Change is good – And DSB has evolved to DailyBloggr

First off, happy Valentine’s day to all. If you’re reading this post on email / rss feeds, I strongly suggest that you head over to the blog and check it out. Because, guess what ? There’s a brand new design in place. And I’m excited because its not just a design change but a complete revamp of the old DailySEOblog as you know it. DSB is now DailyBloggr and here’s why.

We’re not moving away from SEO, but with SEO as the core strength, its growing into many more related fields like Social Media, Web Master info, Web Trends and all that come in between. In fact, most of these categories and articles already existed, but the SEO label was kind of over powering it and some of them went un-noticed which wasn’t fair, I thought. So we have the same content, in fact better content, more articles, more categories, more news, more reviews, more user participation and a whole new brand – DailyBloggr.

I’m really looking forward to your feedback on this, positive or negative, feel free to scribble them down on the comments area.

Oh and by the way, while you drop by you’ll see a lot of changes. Here’s a brief idea about them.

First off, the new design has been done by Aravind Ajith of The Design Superhero. He did a great job in fulfilling my expectations. We’ve been trying a lot of experiments for the last few days and having a great time learning new stuff with the challenges that came across. I strongly recommend Aravind for any WordPress related gig, design, coding or anything. He’s very good at it. Feel free to let him know of the bugs/suggestions you find on the site.

Overview New Features Added.

- Better Comments with social integration.
You’ll see a new, clean and structured comment system in place where facebook and twitter has been integrated in a very simple yet effective manner. I’m not a big fan of third party integration in comments so all those tools have been avoided, and I wanted something simple and fun. So we added two extra fields into the comment form namely facebook and twitter IDs. Which users can use if they wish. Those who are social media mavens (many DailyBloggr readers are) will find this useful as filling these info will add those social network profile links to your gravatar. People who don’t want to use it can ignore it though – same old comments style.
The comments show up in a sort of tree structure where each reply can be seen right under the parent comment, visually distinct and making it easy to figure out how the conversations happened.

- Social Media integration. If you liked the article, everyone else will know for sure.
If you RT or Facebook share the articles, there is a small (rather) box on the top right of every article, where all the recent retweeters will be shown. A better RT button and Facebook share button too. This is an experiment, and not quite fool proof, so please feel free to help me test it.

- A better homepage layout.
No big deal actually, but a faster loading homepage with snippets and one click access to all major stories is always nice.

- Better focus on the article content and lesser distraction elsewhere.
The most important change is that now the focus is on the content more than anything else. Not the logo, not the other stories, not the fan badge or anything else, but the content. But if you wish to look around, there are other stuff as well.

- A speculative placement of ad banners.
Here’s the thing. The blog makes money only through ads. And I wanted a better ad placement, with a better click through ratio and better visibility for advertisers not compromising on the content readability. The 125×125 square ads are so 2008, so I wanted to try something new. We have a new ad area above the fold, near the navigation area, with excellent visibility (can’t get better than this), and reduced Ad-Blindedness, if you know what I mean. Ads in no way are obtrusive to the content, but at the same time promises a better visibility for the advertisers. I’m sure you’ll get along with this feature.

So, that’s pretty much it. I hope you all like it and stay with me for the endeavors ahead, I bet its going to be thrilling times.

Meanwhile, I’m leaving the site in your hands now, its all yours to test and rip off, play with it and feel free to let me know of your thoughts and opinions. Cheers !

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